4"
LENIN AND WAR: AN HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF HIS EVOLVING PERCEPTION
by
Janice N. Simone
B.A., Hartwick College, Oneonta, N.Y., 1974
A MASTER'S THESIS
submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of History
KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY Manhattan, Kansas
198b
Approved by: A11507 533S54
1 9 ft ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To my daughters Lara and Kirsten, who have hoth endured, since birth, a mother who was also a graduate student
To my husband Mike, whose critiques and computer expertise were invaluable
To my major proiessor. Dr. Jacob W. Kipp, whom 1 value as mentor and critic, and who patiently understood my need to balance family and study TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 1
A. Setting the Scene: Illusions About Mar in 131'/ —
Sources o± Explanation . .4
B. Notes to Introduction...... 11
CHAPTER 1. H1ST0R10GRAPHICAL COMPARISONS: KARL MARX AND FREDERICH ENCELS 12
A. The Genesis oi Marxism 12
B. A New Social Order: Marx and Engels' Vision . . . 14
C. Notes to Chapter 1 22
CHAPTER 2. HISTORIOGRAPHICAL COMPARISONS: THE AMMAf.FS 23
A. A Beginning Forged By Mar 23
B. The Annales ' Approach 31
C. Capitalist Transl orraation 40
D. Notes to Chapter 2 43
CHAPTER 3. THE "OBJECTIVE CIRCUMSTANCES" 47
A. War in Industrial Society 47
B. Uneven Development 52
C. Concept ot Imperialism 59
D. Notes to Chapter 3 60
CHAPTER 4. THE BALKAN WARS 62
A. In an International Context 62 B. A Personal traine ol Keterence bJ
C. An Elite Perspective bb
D. Lenin's Assessment bb
E. Economic Development in the Balkans bS
P. Lenin and Sell -Determination . . /I
G. Notes to Chapter 4 11
CHAPTER b. WAK AS "THE SPARK" /b
A. The Centrality ol World War 1 in Lenin's Theory . /b
B. The fre-War Mentalite BO
C. Lenin Returns to Hegel B'2
D. Lenin Connects the Concepts ol Imperialism and War 8b
E. Lenin and the Deepening Crisis ol 191/ 'J2
F. Notes to Chapter b J4
CHAPTER b. WAR AND WELTANSCHAUUNG-EN -- AN H1ST0R10GRAPH1CAL LOOK AT THE CAUSE AND MEANING OF WORLD WAR 1 y/
A. War and Peace as Tools ol Policy 9"/
B. Inter-War and Contemporary Historical Perspective 100
C. Lenin's View ol the future ol War . .Ala
D. Notes to Chapter fa HB
CHAPTER 7. COMPARISON AND CRITIQUE: MARX, LENIN H ANNALES : CONCLUSIONS 120
A. Notes to Chapter / 1J0
BIBLIOGRAPHY i3a Lenin and War: An Historiographical Analysis of His Evolving Perception
Introduction
Envisioning Europe in its last year of peace prior to
the onset of World War I is an exercise in peeling back
layers of rapidly accumulated change. So, too, is the
process of examining the ideas of one of the most
influential political thinkers of the time, V.I. Lenin. This
study will be an analysis, both historical and
historiog -aphical in focus, of Lenin's voluminous writing on
war. His writings reveal his evolving understanding of the
role of social crisis brought by war.
The thesis of this paper is that Lenin, after long
observation and study, came to the conclusion that a total
war like World War I could accelerate the development of
revolutionary class consciousness among the working classes.
The true meaning of that war — of the underlying
assumptions and motivations of the Great Powers and and thus
of the war's essentially class nature — would be evident,
and thereby would create the conditions for civil war and
revolutionary social transformation. But because of the different "objective conditions" of development in societies throughout the world, i.e., "uneven development", progress toward socialism would follow patterns unique to each particular society and in each, such a war would be the catalyst of a transformation of class consciousness.
One must examine Lenin's work over a long period, from
the late nineteenth century through the First World War, to
gain a fuller perspective on its metamorphosis. Isolated
quotes do not adequately explain how he came to his
understanding of war as it was in 1914, nor of his future
expectations. To see how his ideas evolved, one must trace
them from his earliest references to war and related
concepts. Discovering more about Lenin's reflections on
theory aids in assessing how theory guided action and
praxis reformed theory.
The method used here relied heavily on the index to the
English version of Lenin's Collected Works to locate from
within those forty-six volumes his speeches, articles and
pamphlets related to war. To provide historiographical and
philosophical context, this analysis gives considerable
attention to Marx and Engels as Lenin's intellectual
"fathers"; the post World War I French historical school
called Annales which echoed much of Lenin's paradigm of war;
and comparision with other contemporaneous and contemporary
views of World War I.
One can argue that the term "Leninism" implies a static body of thought, thus making its use a misnomer, but
socialist writer Marcel Leibman places it in the proper diachronic context: An analysis of Leninism must be a history of Leninism in its living evolution and no history of Leninism can be separated from the history of the Russian Revolution. ... It is ... not possible to understand Leninism without a close study of its involvement in the political and social setting of Lenin's lifetime. (1)
In this examination of Lenin's conception of war, World
War I rather than the Russian Revolution will be a focal
point of study. The First World War was arguably the main
catalyst of the Revolution so it is basic to set the scene
of this first "total" war. But the Great War was also the
crucible for a process of historiographical transformation
which is perhaps even more relevant today in an age of
nuclear weapons than it was in the "broken world" that
followed the war. 2 The dilemma — unrecognized until those
millions of men faced it directly on the battlefields of
France: what does "modern" war mean and what is its place in
our perception of our world? The message of that war
translates differently for Lenin and his followers than it does for most of the West. It has become something of a vogue for some Western scholars to recall the lessons of
World War I. Their common analytical focus is on the Great
Power political elites' "cult of the offensive," a glorification of offensive strategy which resulted in the illusion that "attackers would hold the advantage on the battlefield, and that wars would be short and decisive...."
The strategists of 1914 were, of course, tragically wrong, and some current scholars see disconcerting parallels in 3
current Western nuclear counterforce strategy.
But Lenin looked at World War I from a different
historical perspective, and it is that which this paper
seeks to explain.
Setting the Scene
Illusions About War in 1914: Sources of Explanation
In the waning years of the nineteenth century when, as
historian Barbara Tuchman writes, "the sun of the old world
was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen
again, "4 Europe was still innocent of the horrors of "world
war". But there was no lack of predictions -- for a very
few, foreboding; for most, dreams of valor, drama and quick
victory. One of the latter, published in 1893 in a British
journal called Black and White and titled The Great War of
189 : A Forecast , went so far as to justify a preference for
a prediction of "a war which lent itself to literary and dramatic treatment, instead of a war which might be more natural but less picturesque." 5
Former British officer Lieutenant Colonel Charles A
Court Repington, military correspondent for The Times of
London prior to and during World War I, referring to the:
first "decisive" battles, predicted that "friends on either side who are late at this rendezvous will be late for the fair." On the eve of the battle of Mons, Repington wrote in glowing terms of "glorious country for fighting in, glorious weather, and a glorious cause. What soldier," he asked exhuberantly, "could ask for more?" (6)
French socialist Jean Jaures, writing in 1898, disturbed by the Dreyfus Affair and the Fashoda Incident,
saw further down the road than the optimistic Repington and
the many others like him:
Peace has been left to the whim of chance. But if war breaks out it will be vast and terrible. For the first time it will be universal, sucking in all the continents. Capitalism has widened the field of battle and the entire planet will turn red with the blood of countless men. No more terrible accusation can be made against this social system. (7)
Ivan (Jean de) Bloch, a leading Russian entrepreneur
and wealthy railroad tycoon who had studied economics and
political science abroad, also wrote a prescient book in
1898. In it he answers the question posed in its title: Is
War Mow Impossible? The Future of War in its Technical.
Economic and Political Relations . Because of conscription,
technological advances, and the interdependence of nations,
wars would absorb "the total energies and resources of the
combatant states, who, unable to achieve a decisive victory on the battlefield, would fight to exhaustion until they had brought each other down in total ruin. " He foresaw the long months of entrenchment of armies, the involvement of civilian populations, and the waste inherent in an arms race which he believed would consume and enervate the belligerents' resources. No nation, whether or not the
"victor", could expect to escape the horrors of total war;
Bloch believed that this realization among the masses would result in anti-militarism and revolution, and, in coniaquanci, national luicida.B
But most of the political and military leaders in Great
Powers operated from a vastly different perspective, seeing
enumerable advantages to fighting what they assumed would be
another of Europe's "small wars." The British generals and
military journalists' hypothetical "picturesque" war pitted
France with Russia against Britain and Germany. They saw themselves as victors and did not expect prolonged military
action. Their outright defense of the prospects and
potential profits from imperialist ventures contrasted with
later exhortations prior to and during the actual war which
tended to gloss over the diplomatic, strategic and financial
profits to be made in favor of talk of freedom and national
honor. But in 1893 they insisted that statesmen must comprehend:
...the splendid potentialities that lie within an energetic and resolute imperialism; the knitting and welding together of the mother country and her colonies and dependencies; the accurate knowledge and estimation of the means of attack and defense that belong respectively to our country and to the great Continental Powers. (9)
These men numbered among what Arno Mayer calls the
"parties -or forces - of order." Their political orientation was predominantly that of the Right, identified by Mayer with the "Old Diplomacy", expansionism, the status quo .
It was not the secret diplomatic method qua method which the forces of order advocated, but rather annexations, protectorates and spheres of influence which, in view of an awakening public opinion, they could not openly claim. (10) Contemporary historian Quincy Wright, in his study of
modern war as a social phenomenon, lists a number of
rationalizations for supporting colonialism. Some, like the
need for "cannon fodder", would not be disseminated in the
popular press. Other reasons were the need for outside
sources of raw materials; the desire to control strategic
frontiers and establish naval bases; colonial jobs and
concessions for the profit of the relatively few;
"expansiveness brought to the average person in identifying
with the larger part of the world"; public diversion during
depression; and the fear that without colonies, national
culture will die out or diminish. Also, colonialism helped
prevent revolution - not by those colonized, but by youthful
colonizers who might otherwise rebel at home. As Wright
notes, "...centralization of political and industrial
responsibility steadily diminishes the number of leadership
jobs while higher education increases the number of those
who think; themselves qualified to lead. "11
Not until the forces of order, now the
belligerents, suffered economic and military exhaustion
after four long years of total war did what Mayer calls the
"parties or forces of movement" find success. Non-
annexationist advocates of a "New Diplomacy", they sought
open diplomacy and popular control over foreign policy- making. 12 Lenin's views both drew from and helped foster this change of outlook. Ironically, though they could not envision the scope,
duration or true meaning of the war, the authors of The
Great Mar of 189 began their hypothetical war with an
assassination attempt in the Balkans: "Prince Ferdinand of
Bulgaria." This minor fact well illustrates the
preoccupation of the "forces of order" with events of war as
if they were moves in a game rather than deadly serious in
nature.
The British forecasters did not have the lineup of
allies correct, but it is understandable, in light of
Fashoda, for them to see France as an enemy. By 1914,
however, Britain, Russia and France had allied against
Germany and Austria. It was an age of intense nationalism,
of colonial competition, of heightened and widespread
propaganda portraying the evils of rival countries,
saturating entire societies with martial spirit. Where once
there had been kinship, both literal and figurative, now
there was hatred. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and George V
of Great Britain were first cousins whose falling out had
international consequences - a quaint idea in retrospect.
The enmity among the heads of state is, of course, a minor part of the picture. In the past, many historians and philosophers tended to explain war by looking at governments and their behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Eighteenth century
Enlightenment philosophes like Emmanuel Kant, Baron de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Paine shared
a belief that societies freed of "the willful machinations
of statesmen and soldiers, princes and diplomats..." would
ceaae fighting wars. 13 Unencumbered by the artificial
diplomacies of the old monarchical and aristocratic systems,
people, by nature peace-loving, would form cooperative,
democratic republics. Reason, grounded in self-interest,
impels people thus liberated to refrain from the barbarism
of the past. The philosophes saw war as inherent in the
structure of absolute monarchy and aristocracy; peace in
that of democracy. War was the concern of Icings, fought by
professionals for royal objectives. But it was also a
"survivor of a bygone epoch. ..from which one day, soon, man
would escape altogether." "The role of the good citizen was
to pay his taxes.... He was required neither to participate
in making the decision out of which wars arose nor to take
part In than onca thay broka out. "14 The philosophes did not
expect this situation to change. Paine wrote that "Man will
not be brought up with the savage idea of considering his
species his enemy. "15 Thinkers like Paine and Adam Smith
believed a "hidden hand" of rationality governed the universe, promoting an equitable and international division
of wealth based upon free trade. War, because it made no economic sense, would be irrational in this context. Men of good will could settle their differences by reasoned discussion. The philosophes' ideas, a cornerstone of what would
become nineteenth century Liberal ideology, raised false
hopes in the power of democratic self-interest and proved
equally false predictors of the demise of war. And it was
not long before the scale of plunder and conquest in the
campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars following the French
Revolution underscored the irony of their miscalculation.
War did not cease as society and technology changed. In
tactics and strategy as well as in meaning, war, too, was transformed.
In seeking to explain war, it is not enough, as
Enlightenment thinkers did, to look at the dominant form of
government. Narrow explorations of the surface of society
do not have adequate explanatory power. One must entwine
studies of government and foreign policy with a perception
of domestic reality. What is required is an
historiographical approach that tries to explain societies
as a whole. Historian Barbara Tuchman is exemplary:
The diplomatic origins of the so-called Great War are only the fever chart of the patient; they do not tell us what caused the fever. To probe for underlying causes and deeper forces one must operate within the framework of a whole society and try to discover what moved the people in it. (16)
Lenin drew from this "total" historical perspective in his work on war. "World War I, involving India, China, Japan and the U.S., precipitated one-world as against the Europe- centered view of international politics, which Lenin sought
10 to incorporate into Bolshevik revolutionary doctrine and
trat«gy."17 This new internationalism was significant, as
will be shown, in the development of an approach to history
which looked at, first, social phenomena of entire cultures
and second, at the ways in which they change.
Notes to Introduction
IMarcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin , trans, by Brian Pearce (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), p. 21.
2Raymond J. Sontag, A Broken World; 1919-1939 in William L. Langer, ed. The Rise of Modern Europe (New York: Harper and Row: 1971).
3L.L. Farrar, Jr. "The Short War Illusion: The Syndrome of German Strategy, August-December 1914," Militaergeschic tliche Mitteilunqen . No. 2 (1972), p. 40 quoted in Stephen Van Evera, "The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War," International Security . Vol. 9, Number 1 (Summer 1984), p. 58. I am indebted to Major David Petraeus, Department of Social Sciences, United States Military Academy, for his comments on the similarities of arguments in the recent scholarship comparing World War I "cult of the offensive" with current nuclear counterforce strategies. In addition to Van Evera, cited here, see also Jack Snyder, "Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984," and Richard Ned Lebow, "Windows of Opportunity: Do States Jump Through Them? " International Security . Vol. 9, No. 1 (Summer 1984), pp. 108-146 and pp. 147-186.
4Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1962), p. 1.
5Rear-Admiral P. Colomb; Col. J.F. Maurice, R.A. ; Cpt. F.N. Maude; Archibald Forbes; Charles Lowe; D. Christie Murray and F. Scudamore, The Great War of 189- : A Forecast (London: William Heinemann, 1893), p. 305.
6 Jay Luvaas , The Education of An Army: British Military Thought. 1815-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 319.
il 7Tuchman , The Proud Tower; A Portrait at the World Before the Mar. 1B90-1914 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1962), p. 21b.
8 Ibid. , pp. 237-23B, and especially Michael Howard, "Men Against Fire: Expectations of War in 1914," International Security . Vol. 9 (Summer 19B4), p. 41.
9Colomb, et al. , appendix, Raymond Blaithwait, "An Interview with the Right Honorable Sir Charles Dilke", pp. 303-304.
lOArno Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin: Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Co., 1959), pp. vii, 7.
HQuincy Wright, A Study of War . Vol. II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 1145.
UMayar, pp. vii, 7-B. 13Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience: The George Macaulev Trevelvan Lectures in the University of Cambridge. 1977 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1978), p. 23.
l*Michael Howard, War in European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 73-/4.
15 lbid . . War and the Liberal Conscience , p. 30.
16Tuchman, The Proud Tower . p. xiv.
17Mayer, p. 300.
Chapter 1 -- Historiographical Comparisons: Karl Marx and E'rederich Engels
The Genesis of Marxism
In the nineteenth century, most historians as well as those in government and educated society were Eurocentric in their assessment of the world. Their narrow West European
12 "
Heltanchauunaen gave an exaggerated or otherwise distorted
historical role to their particular group or nation. They
drew social and economic perspective and philosophical
tradition from their own European past, often with an
elitist bias, not talcing into account the differences and divergences of non-European peoples. Like the raw materials
extracted from their countries, these peoples, often
portrayed as uneducated, uncivilized savages, became
resources to be cultivated and used tor the benefit of the "mother country.
Lenin's intellectual fathers, Karl Marx and Frederich
Engels, sensitized more than a generation of socialists to
the concept of class struggle. Having watched, lamented and
finally fought the oppression of the poor and working
classes in their own European countries, these socialists
saw the exploitation of man's labor become
internationalized. They decried the spread of what would be
called imperialism by those who stood to profit from these
far-flung colonial ventures as well as by those who, through
ignorance or avoidance, supported such exploitation. A great many of these enterprises became caught up in or subsumed under a violent reaction or war and papered over with patriotic zeal. Tuchman writes of the atmosphere during the annexation of the Transvaal in South Africa by the British Empire:
u "
But although patriotic fervor was dominant, there was a current oi antipathy to the war which came ... from an uneasy sense oi ignoble motive, a glitter ol the gold mines of the Hand, an aura of predatory capitalism, commercialism and profit. (1)
Filthy living conditions, endured by the cheap Chinese
labor under contract to Transvaal mine owners, troubled
groups such as the Fabian socialists, who wanted to correct
these ills in a gradual, practical manner. "...The Chinese
labor issue carried the smell of money which had hung about
the Boer War from the start. It devalued the moral content
which the imperialists liked to attach to the cause of
Enpire. "2
A New Social Order: Marx and Engels' Vision
Marx and Engels emerged in the 1840s when imperialism, as Lenin and others later discussed it, was only beginning
to spread. The power of Marx and Engels' analysis came from an assessment of the ills of their own European society caused by the Industrial Revolution, and their reversal of the notion that man had no control over his material world. Their ideas swept across Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century attracting an array of followers who brought to Marxism their own particular modifications and biases. Historian David Hackett Fischer writes that Marx and Engels' erred due to "the fallacy of ethnomorphism,
i.e. by generalizing from "certain group characteristics... of nineteenth century England, France and Germany into universal phenomena for all groups everywhere. "3 But this
14 did not undermine the persuasive effect of their views on
those who sought remedies to the plight of the working
class, especially in the countries they knew best. While
the bourgeois establishment's Eurocentrism thrived with the
status quo . Marx and Engels and their followers, with a
very different brand of Eurocentrism, saw Europe as the
centar ataga for a coning revolution. 4 For they believed
that capitalism was dying, that a new world order,
established in Europe and led by a liberated proletariat,
was on the near horizon. Their views fit an historical
paradigm of progress. "History works out tidily, creating no
problem! it cannot aolva."S The problem of imperialism was
one which others, including Lenin, sought to fit into the Marxian schema.
Marx connected the idealist philosophies of men like
Kant and Hegel with down-to-earth materialism in a marriage
of theory and praxis. In dialectic action of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, the conflict of opposites leading to a higher entity, both theory and praxis evolved, changed, interacted.
The dialectic is the 'dialectic of negativity'. Every fact is more than a mere fact; it is a negation and restriction of real possibilities.... Man's social practice embodies the negativity as well as its overcoming. The negativity of capitalist society lies in its alienation of labor; the negation of this negativity will come with the abolition of alienated labor. (6)
The capitalistic system of private property is
ij essentially an abstraction unconnected to the needs and
essence of the individual. Thus men must become the masters
of the means of production in order to liberate themselves t
from the uniformity and enslavement imposed by the
capitalist system. They can and must take action. The
conflict and contradiction of the dialectic lies not in
ideas, as in Hegel's version, but within social forces,
between classes. Men, rather than passively waiting for
some abstract idea to change society, can themselves effect
significant changes. Marx and Engels believed that conscious
action, a move out of the ideal realm of theory, could bring
the emancipation attainable in classless society. The
problem tor Marx and Engels, as for future Marxists, was to
find a way to accelerate change.
Marx and Engels spoke and worked in behalf of the
working class, or proletariat, against its oppressors, the
bourgeoisie. As in previous epochs of history, one class,
now the bourgeoisie, dominated the means of production and
thus exploited those who labored for them. There was an
element of ambivalence in their assessment. Marx and Engels did not unconditionally view as evil the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system of economic life upon which it had risen to power. One need only read the Communist Manifesto to recognize that capitalism's ability to develop nations seemed indeed to awe its authors. Industrial development created both potential plenty and perpetual poverty,
16 exploiter and exploited. But they assumed it to be a
precondition before nations could turn to collective
ownership and socialism, ridding the world of private
ownership of people, land and capital, and with it, the
enslavement of the proletariat. And that is why, as alluded to above, Marx wrote that each country had to pass through
historically determined stages of economic life: from the
simple structures of primitive societies, through slave,
then feudal periods, to the complex, intense growth of the
capitalistic, and finally, with the defeat of the
bourgeoisie, to socialism. Separating each era must
necessarily be intermittant periods of war and revolution,
with resocialization and ^institutionalization being
gradual as it spread through all layers of society. Marx and
Engels claimed that there could be no "shortcuts" to
socialism. Only late in his life did Marx recognize that
Russia may not follow this pattern, but bypass bourgeois
revolution, thus anticipating the concept of "uneven
development" which became one of the cornerstones of Lenin's theory.
The French Revolution brought the end of feudalism for most of Europe. Although the Directorate, Consulate and
Empire stages eliminated some of the social and political radicalism of 1792-1793, the basic patterns of social, political, and economic relations were profoundly changed. A new era dominated by a new class had begun, as Marx
17 interpreted it, and within this era all wars fought against
feudalism and for the bourgeoisie were just. But bourgeois
society was already creating its rival, a working class that
possessed none of the property which the bourgeois class
sought to enshrine. Before 1B4B, Marx thought proletarian
revolution would immediately follow that of the bourgeoisie,
but the violent suppression of the revolutions of that year,
resulting from the bourgeoisie's fear of radicalism, caused
him to change his mind. He saw that to build socialism
required a viable, fully developed capitalist industrial
base. And eventually the bourgeoisie, Marx thought, would
collapse of is own dynamic, helped along when necessary by
an armed and ideologically informed (conscious) proletariat.
Economic crises within capitalist enterprises would lead to
increased clashes between the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat. After the failure of the Paris Commune in 1B71
in which thirty thousand Communards died, victims of savage
suppression by the French bourgeoisie, Marx saw more clearly
that the proletariat must not just take over state machinery, but bring about its collapse, an interpretation of parxis to which Lenin returned in 1917. Wars could be both catalysts toward and results of this collapsing process, which could last many years. And war fought for the bourgeoisie in this latter era would no longer be just. Marx wrote in 1871 during the Franco-Prussian War that because treaties "can never be fixed finally and fairly, because
18 they always must be imposed by the conqueror upon the
conquered, CtheyJ consequently carry within them the seed of
fr«ah wari."7 Prussia, having won the war, had demanded
cession of Alsace-Lorraine by France. Marx and Engels'
prediction that such a treaty would only lead to more war proved accurate in 1914 and again in 1941, just over twenty
years after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919
and the ending of the "war to end all wars".
In Marx and Engels' conception, society went through a constant process of progressive transformation - of
building, destroying, rebuilding (thesis, antithesis,
synthesis). They assumed certain European nations, as well
as the United States. to be more advanced toward the full
flowering of capitalism and therefore closer to socialism.
As noted, Marx's nineteenth century world view conditioned
his vision for the future. He believed, as Hegel did, in a
logic of history leading to human freedom. Thus he saw the stages of development he and Engels had hypothesized as
evolving "progressively further removed from the primitive
•tagai of man "8 and closer to "the triumph of the free
devalopmant of all man, "9 and to an end of human alienation of man from man and man from nature. Human society was daatinad to bm communist. 10 How this future society would be laid out Marx nor Engels never specified. They made the diagnosis but did not write a prescription. They did, however, put a premium on acting to change the world.
19 Marxism began with its founders' desire to humanize society,
to eliminate the alienation of man caused by
industrialization. When the working class saw that its
misery was not inevitable, it would rise up as one and
restructure society on the basis of cooperation.
Marx and Engels believed that the concept of
nationalism would become meaningless as national divisions
faded and the proletariat grew in consciousness and
strength. 11 They foresaw that it might require total war to
usher in the new order, a war to end class conflict,
eliminate national divisions, and thus make war obsolete.
Later in his life, Engels wrote that militarism was an
extension of capitalism, doomed by the consequences of its
own d«v«lopm«nt, in th« process of its own ntgation.12 He
believed that the social and technological conditions of a
period determined the possible mode of conflict. He could
not imagine soldiers continuing to fight under battle
conditions of rising destructive capacity and assumed armies would thus "disappear" by refusing to participate. Engels
thought the resulting end to opposing armies would have to precede successful revolution. 13
The Communi st Manifesto proclaimed that the workingmen had no country. World War I became the litmus test of this idea, a test which many socialist parties failed. It was
V.I. Lenin who forcefully exposed and disparaged those who espoused international socialism but succumbed to "defense
20 of the fatherland." He sought an explanation for the failure
of Marxism to predict the rise of what he called
"chauvinism" among many of the leaders of the working class,
and this led him toward a new paradigm of war.
When so many socialists failed to oppose the war, which
proved so massive, so nightmarish, that it changed forever
that entire generation, socialist faith in a future
unfettered international community broke down.
In every country, as the air thickened with talk of war, the instinct of patriotism swelled. Older, deeper, more instinctive than any class solidarity, it was not something easily eradicated on the say-
so of the Communist Manifesto . Unhappily for world brotherhood, the worker felt he had a fatherland like anybody else. (14)
The hope for a better world died with the millions of
men on the battlefields of 1914.
Having examined some of the important elements of
Marx's system, there is still a need to place Marx in the
hiEtoriographical continuum. For Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin
share ideological perspectives with a relatively recent and
profoundly new way of writing and thinking about the past
and forces of change, a school of historiography called the
Annales emerging from France in the years following World
War I.
21 Notes to Chapter One
lTuchman, The Proud Tower , pp. 57-58.
2lbid. , pp. 354-358. 3David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies; Toward a Logic of Historical Thought New York: Harper and Row, 1970, p. 226.
4David McLellan, Marxism After Marx: An Introduction (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1979), p. 2.
5Adam Ulam, The Unfinished Revolution: Marxism and
Communism in the Modern World (Revised ed. : Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1979), p. 49.
^Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the
Rise of Social Theory (2nd. ed. : New York: Humanities Press, 1954), p. 282.
7Peter Vigor, The Soviet View of War. Peace and Neutrality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1975), p. 22.
B Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations , ed. and with intro. by E.J. Hobsbawm, trans, by Jack Cohen (New York: International Publishers, 1975), pp. 36,38.
9 Ibid . . p. 12.
lOVigor, The Soviet View of War... . p. 17.
HEdmund Wilson, To The Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1940), p. 228.
iBBernard Semmel, ed. , Marxism and the Science of War . with intro. by the editor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 13.
13Martin Berger, Engels. Armies and Revolution: The Revolutionary Tactics of Classical Marxism (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1977), pp. 142, 157-158.
14Tuchman, The Proud Tower , p. 445.
22 Chapter 2 — HistorioCTraphical Comparisons: The Annales
A Beginning Forged by War
A more "total" approach to historical analysis has
today become commonplace. It was not always so. What has
become the "new history" is a phenomenon of the post-war period. Beginning in France with the Annales . a radically
different paradigm of historical development and the process
of change spread throughout the world, its influence
obvious in an international array of historical journals
originating in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as in the works of many scholars.
Historian Barbara Tuchman's account of the initial
period of the "Great War", written more than forty years
later, brings it to life because she tries to convey its
complexity. She is among the best of the "new" historians.
The old agonized discussions of the relationship between history and the social sciences are increasingly irrelevant, as disciplinary lines are not merely being crossed but trampled under foot.... Social history is becoming a sophisticated study of the lineaments of society itself, as they have changed through time. The new economic historians, the new historians of education, the demographic historians, the new diplomatic historians, and the new historians of science are moving on parallel lines. (1)
The inspiration for and impetus toward this approach to history, proclaimed by two now revered historians, was the First World War itself.
From the end of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth
23 cantury until tha Sacond World Mar, About 1790 until 1930,2
German historicism, which reified the state, held the
position of honor and leadership in Western historical
study. But even before its final tarnishing during the Third
Reich, a new "school" of historiography now known as Annales
began to take shape. In 1919, at the end of the Great War
and in the midst of a social crisis which would decimate
their world, two Frenchmen, newly appointed to the
University of Strasbourg, met for the first time. Marc
Bloch, the younger at thirty-two, and Lucien Febvre, his
senior at forty, were part of a growing group of scholars
who agonized over their discipline and its crisis.
CIndeedJ, in the decade before the First World War Ca3 hostility toward historical consciousness and the historian gained wide currency among intellectuals in every country of Western
Europe.... tCertainJ philosophers. . .argued that the conception of historical time itself, which bound men to antiquated institutions, ideas, and values, was the cause of the sickness. (3)
Traditional history was then, in the German historicist
framework, a "celebration of state purpose and state valuaa.H It attempted, as for example in the works of
German historian G.W.F. Hegel, to superimpose a system of ethics on history, suggesting that whatever was becoming was right. " — Each time and place createLdJ standards valid only for itself ... .The source of such radical relativism was an explicit rejection of the Enlightened belief in the axlatanca of univarally valid natural lawa."5 It eschewed the "universale " for uniqueness, the rational for the
romantic. Eurocentric in the sense of an overriding concern
with European diplomatic relations, it focused on the elite,
using government documents as the major source of historical
explanation. "State conflict was the principal agency of
historical change; social conflict, because it was
destructive of state purpose, was relegated to a remote
background. "6 indeed, the state existed to regulate such
conflict among groups and classes.
German historicism, following Hegel and others,
ascribed a mystic or metaphysical quality to the state as
the manifestation of an unfolding, preordained plan seen as
quasi-divine. It suggested that man could do little to alter
this historical process.
A crisis in the historical discipline developed for
several important interconnected reasons. First, the neo-
Kantian epistomological revolution of the late nineteenth
century disturbed many of those who had clung to a notion of
progress. They could no longer accept a priori assumptions about God's will as the prime mover or meaning of history.
Kant's works contained the precept that "when one trangresses the boundaries of experience, illusions r«iult."7 Thence "disharmony and injustice ceased being mere appearance to be transcended in a later stage or a different realm. They had to be viewed as unredeemed tragedy. "B
Second, the growing strength and recognition of certain
25 s
social concerns and the concept of class struggle eroded the
objectivity of the traditional German elitist historical Weltanschauung. Just as the historicists ' value system
centered on the state, values rooted in social concerns lay
at the base of the changing approach to historiography
espoused by Annales .
Third, absolute war and its awful reality caused
reappraisal of self and society. "History, which was
supposed to provide some sort of training for life... had
done little to prepare men for the coming of the war.... "9
The changes in political structure begun by the war led to change in historical emphasis.
So we return to Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, impelled
by the atmosphere of critique and introspection, the search
for new meaning in history after its rendering by the war.
Thomas S. Kuhn, in his oft-quoted The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions , explains that when members of a
group operating under a particular mode of perception or
paradigm encounter anomaly, the ensuing crisis can be the
prelude to discovery of a radically different mode of
perception. The road to this so-called paradigm shift is usually a long process of puzzle-solving. Though Kuhn ' focus was primarily scientific discovery, his concepts are applicable to history. 10
For Bloch and Febvre the anomaly was a history which drew its evidence from the usually unchallenged actions and
2b words of governments which had brought not progress hut
destruction to society in the form of total war. Tragically,
Marc Bloch, a veteran of the First World War, died in a
German concentration camp during the Second Great War of
this century to tear Europe apart. Four years before he was
shot by the Nazis for his active part in the French
Resistance and undoubtedly also because he was a Jew, Bloch wrote a slim volume called Strange Defeat . With the passion
of a deeply patriotic Frenchman witness to the conquest of
his country, he searched for reasons. He, with his
profession, shouldered some of the blame for preferring "to
lock ourselves into the fear-haunted tranquillity of our
studies" rather than trying to voice what they believed were
the causes of the disaster they could see coming. 11 But the
tools of history itself did not seem to him adequate to the task:
Because our system of historical teaching deliberately cuts itself off from a wide field of vision and comparison, it can no longer impart to those minds it claims to form anything like a true sense of difference and change. (12)
Thus the history which Bloch and Febvre taught was a history which tried to fill that gap - a history of social change, and not just a history of the past.
History is a dialectic of the time span; through it and thanks to it, history is a study of society, of the whole of society, and thus of the past, and thus equally of the present, past and present being inseparable. (13) Fernand Braudel, their successor, explained that "what
21 )
CBloch and FebvreJ mainly turned against was the purely-
political. . .and narrative history of the Sorbonne, while
their attack against the German Chistoricist] school was at
best indirect. "14 But whatever the source of their
greatest disagreement, they would become the founding
fathers of a radically new French historical school known as
Annales . In 1929, with their publication of Annales
d'histoire economioue et sociale . currently Annale s:
Economie s. Societie s. Civilisations , they launched what
would be the most influential -- some say seminal -- journal
since the establishment of the historicist paradigm.
Indeed, one of the Annales ' advocates, Yugoslavia-born
Traian Stoianovich, former student of Braudel and Professor
of History at Rutgers University, wrote a book proclaiming
it« treatment of history as a true superceding paradigml5
after the example of Kuhn's study.
Stoianovich identified three distinct historical
paradigms which have guided methodology:
1 Exemplar history was a conception of the past expressed in narrative, chronicle or critical-explanatory modes, usually emphasizing politics. Braudel called it "a gleam but no illumination; facts but no humanity. "16 Cataloguing events or attempting to explain by examples made no allowance for societal differences or change over time.
2) A new revolution in historical thought came in
linear form, stressing general progress and development . 17
28 Through inductive reasoning it sought universal laws of
human development. The Hegelian historicist approach and
those of both Marx and Lenin fit this category, the former
stressing the progressive, rational development of the state
and the latter, progressive, rational development of material life in the form of class struggle. Gradually these
opposite and yet similar views of history fell prey to "an
awareness of the absurdity of the notion of progress. "IB
3) Stoianovich put what he called the third historical
paradigm to work in hie own study of Balkan civilization. 19
Historians, he explained, had "to develop a mode of
historical inquiry that C could J cope with the complexities
and transformations of their own simultaneously highly rigid
and highly plastic societies. "20 Thus he proclaimed the
significance of a functional-structural model developed
under the leadership of Fernand Braudel and the influence of
the Annales school. Braudel defined structure as "a coherent
and fairly fixed series of relationships between realities
and social masses." Structural restraints are imposed on man
by geography, for example, determining trade routes, the
outcome of a battle, the kinds of crops grown. A way of
thinking or understanding the world, a belief system, a mental habit, can also be structural. "...All [structures! provide both support and hindrance Cto change J.' 21
Braudel, the Annales journal's second editor and acknowledged master, rejected French historian Henri Berr's
29 "too theoretical" journal, Revue de svnthese historiaue .
explaining that the Annales was, in contrast, "firmly on the
ground. In its pages, men of times present and past appear
with their concrete problems, 'alive'...". 22 Braudel
acknowledged and admired Berr's preoccupation with a
synthesis of the diverse branches of history: social, political, economic, science, art, et al . . calling him "a
bit of tha Annalaa bafora tha journal waa cra*tad."23 But
Berr did not go far enough. He merely paid "polite visits" to the other disciplines.
What the Annales proclaimed, CBraudel explained,] was a history whose scope would extend to embrace all the sciences of man — to the "globality" of all the human sciences, and which would seize upon them all in some fashion or other to construct its own proper methods and true domain. (24)
The third paradigm is a view of history as " pluri-
dimensional".25 History's complexity calls for a total,
interdisciplinary inquiry, examining all the functions of an
entire system, or "how a whole collectively functions in
terms of its multiple temporal, spatial, human, social,
economic, Land J cultural dimensions."
The Annales cautions the historian to look at the
"concealed or aymbolic" sub-text of communications, 26 or what Braudel called "unconscious history". Histories based on the face value of the communications of various media, governments, etc., are faulty. In his study of the Balkans,
Stoianovich followed Braudel 's example in seeking beneath
30 the "surface phenomena", first to geology, then biology,
technology, the social and economic strata, and finally,
personality. To do this, he required tools from not just the
historical discipline, but geological, archaeological and
psychological principles as well.
The Annales ' Approach
One of the notable aspects of the Annales 1 growth is
the extraordinary continuity in its leadership and
management. It had only three editorial directors, the
found«ri »nd BraudBl, in half a c«ntury.27 This certainly
played a role in establishing and reinforcing a cohesive
paradigm. Concomitant in growth with the Annales was the
Sixieme Section of the Ecole pratique des haute s etude s:
Science economiaues et sociales . It germinated seventy-
five years before it officially took root as a non-degree
granting teaching and research facility. Febvre was its
first president, a position he held from 1946 till his death
in 1956, and Fernand Braudel succeeded, retiring in 1969. He
was, however, associated with the Annales up until his death
16 years later. The Sixieme Section's significance is in its
importance as a laboratory for team research, usually
interdisciplinary, and for collecting massive amounts of statistical data, one of the hallmarks of the Annales .
Stoianovich indentifies three basic elements in its historiographic schema: I. histoire qlobale : II. a unique
31 conception of time and space; III. communication analysis
I. Histoire jlobale is an attempt to grasp the whole of
a civilization, historical period, or a unit of human
action. Braudel defines civilization as "a system of
realities that exceeds the life span of a specific
0Ci«ty."2B Like Gestalt psychology, the Annales historians
seek a total configuration rather than a collection of
events, drawing together all human sciences. Called
"ecumenical", they take care to be aware of every point of
view. They continue to draw inspiration froa. non-historians,
building upon the achievements of Bloch, Febvre and Braudel
who brought concepts and insights from geology, geography,
biology, sociology, economics, linguistics, law, demography,
folklore, psychoanalysis and collective psychology to the
study of history. 29 They decry artificial divisions of
traditional history into ancient, medieval, modern or of
primitive and civilized society. Stoianovich writes, "...The
part can be comprehended only within the framework of the
whole, and the whole only through the mediation of the
parti. "30 The Annales historians attempt to reconstruct the
past in all its complexity. Seeing small groups as the
microcosm of society or events as a mirror of the past leads
necessarily to a superficial and inaccurate account. One of
the Annales 1 disciples, Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, writes:
"What was achieved by the elite must be set apart, on a different, higher level; it really matters only in the
32 :
history of a conspicuous minority — one that did indeed
foreshadow the future, but which was not as yet able to
lavar out of iti groove tha solid rural man. . . . "31 What
concerns the Annales is what became of that mass. One of
their differences in approach from Marx is their emphasis on civilization rather than nation.
II. A second basic element of the Annales ' view of
history is that of the context of time and space. Regarding
the former, of greatest significance is Braudel's concept of
duree (duration) — continuance or persistence over time.
History, with its diachronic perspective, becomes a unifier
of the social sciences. Braudel wrote of a three-level image
of the past
A-l. His interests and emphasis lay in the metaphorical
oceanic depths — the lonoue duree of trends or structures
taking hundreds of years, remaining virtually intact for
long parioda, though tha functiona thay aarva may change. 32
It ia a "history that stands still ".33 Analysis of these
static societies is what Annales does best: Bloch's Feudal
Society. Ladurie on rural France circa 1300-1720, and
Braudel ' s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in
the Age of Philip II . a book: labelled classic by many for
its methodological ground-breaking. Not without flaws in documentation and organization, and subjected to the sort of sustained critique any radical new approach would draw, The
Mediterranean was an attempt to locate sixteenth century
33 Mediterranean material life "on the requisite world scale",
and to simplify "a succession of landscapes which historians
only rarely depict. "34 What Braudel did was present in
great detail a nearly visual presentation of the "last great
age of the historic Mediterranean. "35 Constants over time
put together with thousands of facts are of the longue
duree . 36
A-2. Level two in the Braudelian construct is akin to
the oceanic tides. The movenne or middle range duree
consists of conlonctures (conjunctures): half- to full-
century cycles recurring only a few times, sometimes only
once within a person's lifespan. " CFor example],
technology, price gyrations, cumulative population changes,
and even mental or cultural shifts... undermine the
'structure', Cusually in a gradual way, sometimes, as
happened during the first world war, telescoped into a
shorter tiraeJ and eventually form a new equilibrium. "37
A-3. Finally, one reaches histoire evenementielle -
history of events. These are merely "surface disturbances,
crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong b»cki."38 At this level of courte duree . "every action is boom, flash, gnash, news and noise, and often
exerts only a temporary impact. "39 With yet a third metaphor for events, Braudel suggested that our daily life, illusions, and immediate awareness are but "deceptive
34 vapors. "40 Braudel also had a separate category of
"signifying" events, that is, events which: 1) Have an
explanatory function; 2) Have spatial or temporal
consequences; 3) Have served as "signs" for contemporaries;
4) Serve as signs for the historian's craft or other
disciplines; 5) Contribute to the formation of an economic
or political series, to which Stoianovich adds social or
cultural. 41
All three strata of historical time superimpose upon
and interpenetrate one another. But "it is ... the substrata
whose substance or whose course must be understood if
we [as historians J are to find meaning in these fugitive,
iridescent, but otherwise haphazard surface movements. "42
History takes on new depth and solidity. We begin to see its
multiple meanings, at the same time reinforcing and
contradictory. 43
B. As noted, history, that is, human action, is a
function of space as well as time. This explains the
Annales ' historians' focus on geology, geography, climate and those areas more specifically socially defined, i.e. territoriality. 44
The space of human collectivities, in Annales thought as in Greek tradition, has a dual aspect — Hermaean and Hestian. It is at once fixed and mobile, autarkic and interdependent. No one can stress sufficiently the constant presence of these two aspects in general human experience. In a state of perpetual tension with each other, they are also necessary complements. (45)
35 This is, in a sense, like a description of traditional male
and female roles. Hermes was the "messenger god, wearer of
the winged cap of liberty and bearer of the magic rod,
instrument of transformation." Hestia, by contrast,
represents "enclosed, domestic, feminine space." She was the
goddess of the hearth — the fixed center of the home.
Braudel used these images to describe the stability of a
Hestian physical milieu which interacts with the forces of
transformation on a scale as small as a herdsman or
merchant, as large as an expanding state. 46
Traian Stoianovich uses another example of a Hermaean/Hestian concept in his Balkan Civilization . He
explains that tradition endowed the prehistoric and early
historic community or collective with an inner hallowed
space and outer boundaries defined by taboo markers. In the
early neolithic (earth culture) period, according to the
author, these markers acquired "proto-economic
significance", meaning they excluded strangers and their
herds from certain areas. 47 These were the crude beginnings
of the practice of holding private property.
A Hermaean/Hestian personification is rich in meaning
and explanatory power. Traditional history neglected Hestian
elements: women and children; cradle and grave; sexuality;
the layout of village or valley; the most basic, static
traditions of domestic and early neolithic agricultural life; the power of climate or terrain to impede or augment
36 - all that which is symbolically and actually tied to space
and soil. What is required, in its most generic sense, is
what Annales historian Jacques Le Goff called a
"demasculinization of history. "48
There are Hestian elements in war as well. During World War I, the tragedies and ironies of fighting and passing
time in the trenches; the dangerous attempts to traverse the
barbed wire-entangled no man's land and fierce battles to
capture a few more yards of territory; the absurdity of the
nearness of home yet its tremendous distance in
understanding are obvious examples. Away from the
battlefield, whether a distance of a few miles or an ocean,
civilians, too, undergo profound changes in mentalite as
well as material life. War-induced famine brings the war to
the hearthside of the peasant or working class family.
III. Communications analysis, the third basic in the
Annales paradigm, has qualities both Hestian, the inner meaning, and Hermaean, the outer appearance. Stoianovich discusses the importance to historians of the Freudian concept of the unconscious. We now recognize that irrationality or hidden motive are less obvious but major factors in human communication and thought.
Psychoanalysis has made possible a probing of the document behind the document, of the unsaid behind the said, of the secret behind the secret, of the relationship tamongJ words, works, and other signs (external, public) and their significations (internal, hidden, Hestian). (49)
37 Only over the lonjue duree can one envision a society's
mentalite. It encompasses its mindsets or points of view
deeply imbedded in institutions, its controlling thoughts
"scarcely subjected to critical examination. "50 Not merely
the written word but "material and figurative objects",
"signs and symbols" are important historical data. "Music
and dance, posters and billboards, conventional art, the
multiple languages of scianca, thea,tar, cinam»"51 add
insights. Fashion, childrearing practices, mythology and
other oral traditions, printed communications and books which can be analyzed for what is unwritten as well as written — all reflect the social milieu and underlying
Mel tans chaumwen .
An outstanding example of an analysis of the written word of World War I is Paul Fussel's The Great War and
Modern—Memory, a book which compares and contrasts the literature of the wartime and post-war eras. He suggests that "at the same time the war was relying on inherited myth, it was generating . new myth. . . "52 "...Even if those at home had wanted to know the realities of war," Fussel writes, "they couldn't have without experiencing them; its conditions were too novel, its industrialized ghastliness too unpracadantad. "S3 But this shift in consciousness, though it could not mentally scar civilians in the same way it did those who fought, nevertheless permeated all of society. World War I uprooted entrenched attitudes toward
38 the meaning of war, till then unquestioned.
Heretofore described was the basic Annales schema. Many
historians and other social scientists have criticized it
for its cumbersomeness, its need to know everything about
everything. David Hackett Fischer decries the "holistic
fallacy" in history.
The whole truth, at any stage of an inquiry, is an ideal that ought to be abolished from historiogra- phy, for it cannot ever be attained. ... C It is aJ road that can only end in the intellectual suicide of relativism .. or .methodological anomie. . . . ( 54)
Fischer also debunks the "fallacies of presumptive
continuity and presumptive change" by historians. "What is
clearly needed," he suggests, "is a set of mediating terms
and concepts which might help to neutralize these opposite biases. "55
Fischer's "holistic" critique is certainly a valid one
for Annales. Indeed, as the Annales historians seek the
whole, they cannot help but be selective in their subjects
chosen and evidence gathered based on their own particular biases and Heltanschauunqpn , as much as they attempt to portray totality. And Annales is certainly subject to its own set of values affecting analysis. In their attempt . however, to take global issues into account they stimulate awareness of areas and subjects long neglected by historians.
Regarding Fischer's fallacies of continuity and change,
39 Annales ' heuristic tools of time-space and communications
analysis go far toward more completely and evenhandedly
describing the relationship between the two concepts, which is essentially dialectical.
Capitalist Transformation
It is significant that the views of Annales and Lenin
were forged for the most part by World War I and that both
looked to economic factors for an explanation. Marc Bloch
wrote during World War II that "old resentments drew fresh
vigor from an exacerbated sense of inequality." The lower
classes, burdened more than usual under the duress of total
war, "bagan to make their voices heard. "56 a discussion of
an Annales' conception of capitalist transformation
illustrates where they saw one of the origins of the social
unrest which would lead to conflict.
The static societies well described in the context of
lonque duree break down when capitalism arises. In Western Europe, the new capitalist mentality , though it involved
revolutionary changes, rose "organically". Capitalist
mechanisms in Western Europe drew the masses further into
new modes of production and thereby transformed the
structures of a material life that had remained relatively
stable for hundreds of years. Fernand Braudel returned to
his permeable layer device in his analysis of capitalism. At bottom is material life . the structures and "repeated
4U t
actions. . .handed down from time immemorial," 57 routine daily existence.
Slowly a market economy develops above this level
through an increasingly differentiated but still ordinary economic life . It is the "link between production and
consumption", but only "a fragment of lithe} vast whole"
constituting material life at bottom and capitalist
hierarchical power at top. 58
Once capitalism has become truly entrenched in a
specific area, urban society dominates rural, a new
hierarchy is in place, and the changes wrought are
revolutionary. Capitalism is the economic activity at the
summit, the high profit zone. 59 More sophisticated than
the middle level economic life of trade, transport, and
differentiated markets, it "encroaches on all forms of
life. "60 Changes in values precede or converge with the
spread of capitalism. Older traditional value conceptions
must give way to or assimilate a concept of economic value,
that is, of desire for money and material goods. There must
be a new attitude toward work as a virtue, a move away from
relatively closed rural subsistence society, and the
development of a bourgeoisie and a working class. Community (Gemeinschaft) gradually gives way to society ( Gesellschaf )
as capitalism spreads. Sociologist Ferdinand Toennies popularized this distinction between the two kinds of social structural organization in a developmental model within
41 t t t t t ,
which the first is a web of relationships predicated on
personal recognition, the second, characterized by more impersonal, contractual relations.
A 'family', 'clan', 'village' 'friendship' may serve as approximate examples of
' ' 'Gemeinschaf . but they are Gemeinschaf ' only to the extent to which they coincide with the ideal ' conceptual image of Gemeinschaf ' . 'City' ,' state' 'industry', 'public opinion' may serve as examples ' of Gesellschaf ' in the same way. In other words, viewed in the light of normal concepts, actual
' societies, especially of the Gesellschaf ' type, are always mixed. (61)
It is essential to note that these changes do not occur
at the same pace or in the same fashion everywhere in the
world. Capitalist transformation varies in intensity and
scope. The economies of the world lie in "a succession of
different altitudes, as in a relief map." 62 What evolved,
according to Braudel, was an "essentially unequal world of man." 63
It is easy to imagine, CBraudel wrote], the upheavals which the sudden introduction of technology and all of the accelerations it entails must create within each civilization, within its own spiritual and material frontiers. But these upheavals are not a straightforward affair. They vary with each civilization and each one, without wishing it, finds itself placed in a unique position, because of realities which have existed for a long time and which are highly resistant, being part of its structure. It is from the conflict — or the harmony — between ancient attitudes and new necessities, that each people daily forges its destiny, its "actuality. " (64)
As Stoianovish aptly describes, capitalism in late- developing societies, such as those of the Balkans or Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, became an external,
42 peripheral, disruptive force because it clashed with
traditional attitudes. It created a dissonance which was
different from the more organic absorption which had taken
place in the now advanced industrialized Nest European
societies. The later developing societies which had not yet
let go of prevailing early market (pre-capitalist)
structures and values were dominated externally by
imperialist enterprise. Achievement of the internal social
transformation required for economic "takeoff" had to await
a change in mentalite and the emergence of a proletariat. 65
If there was not a convergence of outside capitalist stimuli
with internal demand, conscious or unconscious, 66
capitalism could be a disorganizing influence creating
conditions of potentially violent unrest. Lenin
characterized this process as one of "uneven development"
and saw profound consequences in it.
Notes to Chapter Two
lDavid Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought , p. 218n.
2Fischer, Historians' Fallacies , p. 156.
3Hayden V. White, University of Rochester, The Burden of—History (1966)., p. 119. (no publication information available) I am indebted to Dr. George Kren, Dept. of History, Kansas State University, for introducing this reading as a course requirement in historiography.
43 4George Enteen, "History and the Social Sciences: Emerging Patterns," History of European Ideas . I, 4, (1981), p. 352.
5George M. Kren, "Political Implications of German Historicism, The " Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal" . VI, 1, (April 1969), p. 98.
fcEnteen, "History ", p. 352.
^Raymond B. Blakney, ed. An Emmanuel Kant Reader (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), p. xv.
BEnteen, "History...", p. 352.
9White, The Burden of History , p. 120.
lOThomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (2nd ed. , enlarged: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 52-91.
llMarc Bloch, Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 . with an introduction by Sir Maurice Powicke and a foreward by Georges Altman, trans, from the French by Gerard Hopkins (New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 196B), p. 172.
12 Ibid. , p. 155. 13 Fernand Braudel, On History , trans, by Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 69.
14Fernand Braudel, "Forward", in Traian Stoianovich, French Histori cal Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 11.
15lbid.
16Braudel, Qn History , p. 11.
17Braudel, "Forward" in Stoianovich, French Historical Method , p. 236.
IBlbid. , p. 33.
ISStoianovich, A Study in Balkan Civilization (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 214.
20stoianovich, French Historical Method , p. 35.
44 21Braudel, On History , p. 31.
22Braudel, "Personal Testimony," Journal of Modern History . XLIV, 4, (December 1972), p. 461.
33 lbid . , p. 455.
2 4 Ibid. , p. 457.
25stoianovich, French Historical Method , p. 232.
26 French Historical Method , pp. 236-237.
27J.H. Hexter, "Fernand Braudel and the Monde
. ," Braudellien. . Journal of Modern History . XLIV, 4, (December 1972), p. 46B.
28stoianovich, French Historical Method , p. 14B.
29H.R. Trevor-Roper, "Fernand Braudel, the Annales and
the Mediterranean," Journal of Modern History . XLIV, 4, (December 1972), p. 468.
30 Stoianovich, French Historical Method , p. 129.
3lEmmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "History That Stands
Still," chapt. in The Mind and Method of the Historian , trans, from the French by Sian and Ben Reynolds (Brighton, England; The Harvester Press, 19B1), p. 24.
32Hexter, p. 502.
33Ladurie, pp. 1-27.
3 4Braude , 1 Capitalism and Material Life; 1400-1B00 , trans, from the French by Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), p. 442.
35Trevor-Roper , "Fernand Braudel. . .", p. 47B. 36Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life . . . , p. 442.
37Enteen, "History and the Social Sciences. . .", p. 358.
38Trevor -Roper, "Fernand Braudel. . .", p. 475.
39Stoianovich, French Historical Method , p. 109.
40Hexter, p. 503.
45 41Stoianovich, French Historical Method , p. 230.
42Trevor-Roper, p. 476.
43stoianovich, French Historical Method , p. 66.
44 Ibid . , p. 76.
45 lbid . , p. 62.
4 6 Ibid. , pp. 62, 77.
47stoianovich, A Study in Balkan Civilization (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), pp. 39-43.
48stoianovich, French Historical Method , pp. 158-159.
49lbid. f P- 110.
50Hexter, p. 483.
SlStoianovich, French Historical Method , p. 90.
52Paul Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. ix. 53 Ibid . , p. 87.
54D.F. Fischer, Historians' Fallacies... , pp. 65-66. 55 Ibid . . pp. 154-155.
56flloch, Strange Defeat , p. 164.
57Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life . . . , p. xiii.
58Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and
Capitalism . trans. by Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), P. 41.
59Braudel, Afterthoughts , pp. 112-113.
60Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life . . ., pp. xii- xiii.
6lFerdinand Toennies, On Sociology: Pure Applied, and Empirical: Sel ected Writings , ed. and with intro. by Werner J. Cahnman and Rudolf Heberle (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), pp. viii - ix; pp. x-xiv; pp. 62-72.
62Braudel, Afterthoughts . . p. 35.
46 63Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits °£—the Possible, Vol. I in Civilization and Capitalism. 15th-lBth Century- trans, from the French and revised by Sian Reynolds (London: William Collins Sons amnd Co., Ltd., 1981), p. 562.
64Br»ud«l, On Hiitorv. pp. 213-216. 65Stoianovich, Study A of Balkan Civilization . . . p. 99. ,
66 Ibid . . p. 17.
Chapter 3 — The "Objective Circumstances"
War in Industrial Society
By the end of the nineteenth century in Europe, those
capitalist mechanisms which Braudel described had
irreversibly changed the nature of war. Mass-produced
advancements of weapons technology, such as the new steel
breech-loading cannon, which succeeded the more awkward and
less powerful muzzle-loading rifled cannon; recoilless
carriages in heavy artillery, eliminating the need for
constant re-sighting; poisoned gas; torpedoes; naval mines;
magazine-loading, small-bore rifles, which were easier and
faster to load and, significantly, could be fired lying down; smokeless powder, which opened the field of battle and
increased firing capability; and extensive use of the improved Maxim machine guns, which could fire several hundred rounds a minute, added tremendous military
47 trangth.l These developments transformed, to borrow from
the title of John Keegan'i book, "the face of battle". 2
In medieval times, battles had a close relation to
everyday life. They "could be comprehended on a human
timescale and in a human way. " But one of the most salient
factors about modern battle as it had evolved by the early
twentieth century was its impersonalization. Soldiers
described a "sense of littleness, almost of nothingness".
One reason was the change in the physical characteristics of
the battlefield itself, too large for one person to see even
a majority of the whole, defoliated, depopulated of
civilians and animals, and scarred so deeply that even today
the craters, trenches, and abandoned or unearthed materiel
may be seen. Soldiers on opposing sides rarely saw each
other face to face, therefore they had virtually no means to
communicate, including that of a desire to surrender. 3 The
accuracy, rapidity and range of firepower multiplied five
times. For example, from June 24-30, 1916, just before the
monumental battle of the Somme, Entente forces expended a
then incredible 1,500,000 shells. With the rise in volume
and killing power of munitions came the corresponding rise
in objective dangers encountered by the soldier. 4 A strategy of intense indirect artillery fire was thought to overcome the advantage of heavily entrenched defensive positions.
With the increase in population, widespread use of conscription, and improvements in rail and road networks,
4a both manpower for huge standing and reserve armies as well
as the means to get them to battle changed strategy and
tactics. War was no longer limited to the distant
battlefield and professional military elite. It became far
more difficult to control and direct, leading to the
creation and expansion of military staffs. And its horrors
permeated both military and civilian populations, involving
all classes but hitting hardest those nearest the bottom.
The number of casualties in the First World War was
staggering. Twenty thousand men died in the first hour of
the Sonne. Two hundred fifty thousand British fell in the
first fiva months. 5 in planning mobilization, in determining
strategy, and especially when overwhelming casualties
threatened defeat, "General Staffs vied with one another in
demanding ever larger forces as the solution to their
problems. "6
Within the same general period of the advent of total
war, developments in industrial capitalist societies like
the internal combustion engine, the wireless and other
improvements in communication, and the spread of electric
power spurred industrial growth. With the growing complexity
of society and the need for greater efficiency, governmental bureaucracies expanded, education and training increased, and the role of the "expert" both in government and military became a tr»nd.7 The advent of mass industrial production and the profit incentive affected the development of raw
4y material, minai, toundriai, and tramportation.B
Empire-building and the search tor markets was at a
high in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in
the Near and Far East, Africa — anywhere the capitalists
found fertile ground for colonization or exploitation of
far-flung resources. One can cite, in addition to the Great
Power involvement in the Balkans which triggered the
outbreak of World War 1, such examples as the 1898 Open
Door in China , the Spanish-American War, the 1B99 Boer War,
the British in India and the Dutch in the East Indies,
Russian penetration into Central Asia and Manchuria, the
French in Indochina, and the Japanese incursion into Formosa
and Korea. These were some of the objective circumstances
behind Lenin's formulations.
In the development of Lenin's perception of war, the
year 1905 was a turning point. Lenin wrote of the "deeper
implications" of the Russo-Japanese War.
Wars today are fought by peoples; ... Lthe war J opens the eyes of millions to the disparity between the people and the government which heretofore was apparent only to a small class-conscious minority. (9)
Lenin saw that the debacle of this war had the potential to
radicalize not just the Russian proletariat but also the
peasantry to a degree no previous amount of propagandizing had been able to do.
CHeJ came to the conclusion, in fact, that a revolution Cin Russia] could not be carried out by the working class in its own name, without the support of other mass movements such as the
50 nationalities or the peasants; in other words, a socialist revolution in the traditional Marxist
sense was an impossibility. ( 10)
But with the additional interests of these groups,
imperialist war could become or, with agitation, be used to
encourage, civil war. The Russo-Japanese War was a
significant milestone in the evolution of Lenin's views.
Here he first began to see a relationship between imperialist war and revolution.
Two years after the outbreak of World War I, Lenin
observed that "war does not alter the direction of pre-war
policial, but only accalarata. th.ir IwlcmHt.»13 This
idea may sound familiar to the student of the works of
military strategist Karl von Clausewitz, published close to
eighty years earlier. His famous dictum, "War is the
continuation of politics by other, i.e. violent means," is
well known. Lenin, too, as Frederich Engels did, read
Clausewitz. Despite the fact that Clausewitz was a
politically conservative Prussian general writing in a
different era, Lenin searched On War for military analyses
related to his own Marxist perspective. Indeed, if the
volume of his note-taking and exclamatory comments is an
indication, he seemed elated by the he connections made. 12 References to Clausewitz and variations on his dictum abound in Lenin's works after 1315. In a lecture of May 1917 he wrote:
51 CClausewitzJ. . .challenged the ignorant man-in-the- street conception of war as being a thing apart from the policies of the governments and classes concerned, as being a simple attack that disturbs the peace, and is then followed by a restoration of the peace thus disturbed, as much as to say, "They had a fight, then they made up." (13)
Though Lenin borrowed from the "bourgeois" military
strategist, ha gave a "new Marxian twist "14 to the Clausewitzian dictum. While Clausewitz understood politics
as the external relations of a state power, Lenin saw its
socioeconomic underpinnings. Donald E. Davis and Walter S.G.
Kohn, who translated and edited Lenin's "Notebook on
Clausewitz", offer an interpretation:
War was the result of an imbalance in which one empire encroached on another, or where colonials themselves revolted. .. .Lenin' s system transformed Marxism itself by explaining the means of production in terms of cartels and describing the operation of the dialectic through the opposition of the imperialists and exploited colonial!. 15
Thus perhaps one may say Lenin militarized Marx and
"materialized" Clausewitz! 16 He realized that both economic
and political context were necessary to explain war.
What may be called Lenin's "discovery" of Clausewitz
came only after more than two decades of voluminous writing,
thinking and discussing, as well as equal years spent engaged in and observing revolts, strikes or outbreaks of war.
Uneven Development
Marx had analyzed the profound technological and social changes made by international industrial capitalism. He
52 believed that exploitation of the working class and the
destructive element inherent in capitalism would lead to a
final international crisis and war. But Lenin, in seeking
to connect war with capitalism, recognized that each
individual country must be analyzed by its own specific nature as it evolved within a distinct, concrete historical
letting. 17 He began to see the difference in the eastern
part of the world, writing in 1915:
In China, Persia, India and other dependent countries. . .we have seen during the past decade a policy of rousing tens and hundreds of millions of people to a national life, of their liberation from the reactionary "Great" Powers' oppression. A war waged on such a historical basis can even today be a bourgeois- progressive war of national liberation. (18)
Because of uneven development, Lenin thought, the end
of all war was not on the horizon as Marx and Engels had
thought. Industrialized nations, in their search for new
sources of capital and influence, would prolong the
phenomena of war indefinitely. The countries of the Balkans,
Russia and Austria, which Lenin placed in a second
geographic category in respect to the process of self-
determination and the progress toward revolution, were still
involved in intensely national struggles. Hence, as socialism was a long way off, so, too, was any prospect of an end to conflict there. Serai-colonial, developing nations, too, would not accomplish overthrow of feudal vestiges at the same time and the same pace, thus violence would
5 1 continue indefinitely in those areas of the world.
At the turn of the century, the Boxer Rebellion in
China was a striking example of the clash often caused by
developed nations seeking worldwide "spheres of influence".
To Lenin, the "mad policy" in China was a good illustration
of his view of violence, revolt and war as the necessary
products of a changing form of capitalism. The benefits of
Russian and West European policy went, Lenin said, to only a
"handful" of "capitalist aces", manufacturers, military
contractors, and "nobles occupying high civil and military
positions." He wished his readers to note whose interests
were being met by the war, the "real" nature of government policy.
What good will the working class and all the laboring people get from the conquests in China? Ruined families and increased government indebtedness The tsarist government holds not only our people in slavery -- it sends our people to pacify other peoples who rise up against their slavery. (19)
The Chinese people suffer from the same evils as those from which the Russian people suffer — they suffer from an Asiatic government that squeezes taxes from the starving peasantry and that suppresses every aspiration towards liberty by military force; they suffer from the oppression of capital, which has penetrated into the Middle Kingdom. (20)
In 1903, Lenin, frustrated with the working class's
lack of power, saw national liberation as benefitting primarily the bourgeoisie. Thus he wrote of subordinating the fight for national liberation in Poland to proletarian
1.4 cla»s struggle. 21 "The day is gone when a bourgeois
revolution could ignite an independent Poland. ... "22 He put
all his faith in the "class conscious and organized
proletariat"; only it could "win real, not sham, freedom for
the people. "23 But he also said that "in isolated and exceptional cases... we can advance and actively support
demands conducive to the establishment of a new class Ci.e.
bourgeois:) state or to the substitution of a looser or
[weaker] federal unity, etc. for the complete political
unity of a state. "24 The uneven development of the Balkan
states was what he had in mind here, and as the situation in
that part of the world became more volatile, Eastern Europe
continued to influence Lenin's thinking.
By 1905, after experiencing war and an abortive attempt
at revolution in Russia, he turned again to the concept of uneven development:
The class-conscious proletariat, an implacable enemy of war — this inevitable and inseverable concomitant of all class rule in general - cannot shut its eyes to the revolutionary task which the Japanese bourgeoisie, by its crushing defeat of Russian autocracy, is carrying out.... We must recognize the great revolutionary role of the historic war in which the Russian worker is an involuntary participant. (25)
Even though backward and despite the small size of its working class of one million compared with seventy-five million peasants, Russia was, Lenin wrote in 1905, becoming more capitalistic. Though the spread of large-scale factory industry would bring more benefits for the few and more
55 struggle for the rest of society, he accepted this change as
a necessary and progressive prerequisite to socialism.
Capitalism must come and expand before finally succumbing to
the class-conscious, radicalized proletariat. 26 Meanwhile
Lenin insisted that the Russian proletariat must support the
constitutional movement of the bourgeoisie. He "regarded
Parliament as an instrument to be used for revolutionary
purposes, not to be worked for democratic purposes", 27
seeking the industrial growth that capitalism meant, not the
bourgeois concept of democracy, indeed, he constantly warned
the proletariat not to be seduced by the lofty phrases the
bourgeois military and press attached to its wars. 28
Not until 1917 did Lenin, to the surprise of many of
his followers, reject his previous insistence on waiting for
successful bourgeois revolution in Russia. Though he had
considered such an eventuality possible, he did not plan to
bypass that stage of development and was, in fact,
astonished at the suddenness of his ascendency to power,
having been in exile for so many years. 29 The terrible
strain and trauma of the war strengthened and radicalized
the working class while at the same time broke the tentative
hold of the already weak liberal bourgeois provisional
government. There was a power vacuum in Russia in 1917, so
Lenin and his party simply filled it.
In 1908 Lenin wrote: "The struggle for colonies and the conflict of commercial interests have in capitalist society
56 become one of the main causes of war. "30 This was a
significant alteration in his portrayal of capitalism from a
constructive system to one which was basically destructive of society.
At the International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart
the pfevleui year, he had discoursed on the theme of war as
a necessary product of capitalism but cautioned socialists
to examine the nature of the preceding crisis and its
•conomic or political "obj«ctiv« condition!. "31
The working class, which is the principle supplier of soldiers, and which bears the brunt of the material sacrifice, is in particular the natural enemy of wars, because wars contradict the aim it pursues, namely, the creation of an economic system founded on socialist principles.... But it does not follow — that it is of no concern to the proletariat in what country it lives in monarchical Germany, republican France, or despotic Turkey. The fatherland, ie. the given political, cultural and social environment, is a most powerful factor in the class struggle of the proletariat. (32)
Lenin recognized that socialists must see each individual society's own specific nature. He pragmatically adapted Marxian concepts to conform with his appraisal of
the Balkans, where he supported the demand for national liberation made by the Balkan bourgeois-democratic nationalist movements and among those peasants influenced by nationalist lantiment. "33 But by 1908, as noted, war and capitalism were linked closely in his analysis as he examined the tension and potential for crisis in that
5 7 region. Therefore, he did not support the Balkan Wars of
1912 and 1913. He viewed the aims of the majority of the
belligerents as overridingly expansionist. "Capitalist
machinations" for influence and profit overshadowed what
little the Balkan nationalists gained — all at tremendous
cost to those under fire. The justness of a war turned on
the question of which class was at the helm.
Lenin thought, like Braudel, that change which touched
upon the everyday life of the working classes was of great
significance. But in order to last, the people must be
conditioned to accept it. Total war with its all-
encompassing capacity to shake the very roots of society,
could speed up changes in structure and function. Wars could
set off revolutions, create new social patterns. In the
Balkans, where many of the structures were still feudal, Lenin expected the revolution to be bourgeois.
In 1916 during World War I, Lenin continued to see war
as an "unequaled accelerator of history Cwhich would} give a
decisive impetus not only to the ripening of the
revolutionary crisis in Europe but also to the development
of non-European power centers and to the colonial
awakening. ... "34 And peace, Lenin grew to see during World War I, "could be nothing but the accounting and registration of the actual changes in the realities of forces brought about in the course of and in consequence of war. "35
bb Concept of Imperialism
"Classical" Marxist theory had placed wars of "national
liberation" into an earlier era of European history, ending
with the 1871 Paris Commune. But that model applied to
Western Europe, The overwhelmingly agrarian societies of the Balkan peninsula had virtually no proletariat and an
insignificant bourgeoisie. Multi-national, feudal and tribal
relations prevailed. Industry and commerce, dominated by
foreign powers, had only a weak foothold prior to World War
I. Nationalist ideals stirred the peasantry as socialism
could not do. In scrutinizing Lenin's articles on the Balkan
Wars, with which Lenin intended to instruct fellow
socialists, there is one message denouncing the imperialists
and another encouraging the masses aroused by nationalist fervor.
The aggrandizement of the Great Powers, greed for
territorial annexations and spheres of influence, was the
most significant element provoking the wars. Italy, Austro-
Hungary, the Young Turks, Russia — all sought to further or
sustain their interests. The Balkan nations themselves were
no less interested in booty. In the years prior to World War
I, certain socialists advanced "the theory of imperialism as
'the highest stage of capitalism', La phenomenon! brought on by a last desperate quest for diminishing profits and leading inevitably to clashes between competing capitalisms." Historian Roland Stromberg adds that "Lenin
59 borrowed this idea, loosely formulated by others who had
built upon tha th«ory of Karl Marx. "36 Not until 1915, in
his search to explain the socialists' desertion from their
internationalist ideals in the face of world war, did Lenin
write his tract on this subject. 1905 provided the question
which 1917 would answer: if a short imperialist war led to
significant social revolt, could a longer, more widespread
war lead to successful revolution? The Balkan Wars provided
evidence to support a maturing theme.
Notes to Chapter Three lHcward, War in European History , pp. 102-104.
2 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976).
3 Ibid. , pp. 320-322.
*Ibid. , pp. 231, 305.
iSAlan Hamilton, "Last Farewell to Somme 70 Years On", The Times (London), July 2, 1986, p. 20, col. 2.
^Howard, War in European History , p. 105.
7Faul Kennedy, ed. , The War Plans of the Great Powers. 1BB0-1914 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979), p. 2.
BThe Proud Tower , p. 235.
SLenin, "The Fall , of Port Arthur", XIII, Collected Works . p. 50.
lOLeszek Kolalcowski , Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise > Growth and . Dissolution Vol. II: The Golden Age . trans, from the Polish by P.S. Falla (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 472.
ULenin, "The Peace Programme," XXII, Collected Works . (March 25, 1916), p. 163.
60 12Donald E. Davis and Walter S.G. Kohn, "Lenin as
Disciple of Clausewitz", Military Review . (September 1971), pp. 49-55.
13Lenin, "War and Revolution: A Lecture Delivered May 14, 1917", XXIV, Collected Works . (May 1917), p- 899.
14Davis and Kohn, p. 191.
15 lbid .
lbJacob W. Kipp, "Lenin and Clausewitz: The Militarization of Marxism, 1914-1921," Military Affairs . (October 1985), pp. 184-191.
17Lenin, Mational Liberation ; n t-.h» Fact-, preface and compilation by C. Leiteisen (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), p. 182.
lB lbid . , p. 117.
19Lenin, IV, (1900), Collected Works , pp. 347-352, quoted in Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 35-36.
20Lenin, "The War in China", IV, (Dec. 1900), Collected Works , p. 372.
2lLenin, "The National Question in Our Programme", VI, Collected Works . (July 15, 1903), pp. 461-462.
22Fischer, Life of Lenin , p. 38 quoting Lenin in Iskra, July 15, 1900.
23Lenin, "May Day", VII, Collected Works . (April 1904), p. 202.
24Lenin, "The National Question in Our Programme," VI, Collected Works , pp. 454-455.
25Lenin, "The Fall of Port Arthur", VIII, Collected Works, (Jan. 14, 1905), p. 52.
26Lenin, "The Autocracy and the Proletariat", VIII, Collected Works (Jan. 4, 1905), pp. 26-27.
27Fischer, Life of Lenin , p. 52.
28Lenin, "Events in the Balkans and in Persia", XV, Collected Works (Oct. 16, 1908), p. 221.
61 29Barrington Moore, Jr., Soviet Politics-The Dilemma of Power: The Role of Ideas in Social Change (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1950), p. 19.
30Lenin, "On Proletarian Revolution", XV, Collected Works, (September 1908), p. 44.
31Lenin, "The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart", XIII, Collected Works . (Oct. 1907), pp. 75-93.
32Lenin, "Bellicose Militarism", XV, Collected Works . (July 23, 1908), pp. 193-194.
33Lenin, The National Liberation Movement in the East , preface and compilation by C. Leiteisen (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969) p. 89.
34Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin , p. 300.
35 lbid . . p. 6.
36 Roland V. Stromberg, Redemption by War : the Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1982), pp. 121-122.
Chapter 4 — The Balkan Wars
In an International Context
The backdrop to the 1912-1913 wars was a complex world
of shifting alliances and West European abuse of its growing
political and economic power. Italy wanted and obtained
Tripoli and the Dodecanese Islands from Turkey, fearing the
consolidation of French control in Morocco) 1 Russia wanted
control of Constantinople and naval rights through the
Straits of Bosphorus and the Dardanelles; Austria formally
62 2
annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, which Serbia wanted; and Russia
attempted to organize a Balkan pact against the Austro-
Hungarian Dual Monarchy because the Bosnia annexation was a humiliating preemption of a secret plan for mutually
supported Balkan spheres of influence. In addition, Serbia,
with Russian backing, and Greece, sought control of what
would become Albania; Austro-Hungary desired and
orchestrated Albanian independence; Serbia and Bulgaria
settled conflicting claims on Macedonia in a second Balkan
War, and those peoples still subject to the Ottoman Empire
and Auatria-Hungary Bought aalf -determination.
A Personal Frame of Reference
To place the Balkan Wars in a more personal context, a
well known autobiographical work is illustrative. The
dramatic words of a writer born and raised in Montenegro
skillfully draw the reader deeply into the realities of
Balkan life. Milovan Djilas was a leader in the post-World
War II international communist movement. His Land Without
Justice is a lyric portrait of his kinsmen and his land.
Because he was born in 1911, he based his account of the
wars on stories passed down to him. But even at that tender age he was not unaware. "Cannon thundered through my first raal remambranca. "3
Djilas' father, a first-generation Montenegrin officer, and men like him "bore the brunt of the wars of 1912 and
1914." They, unlike the preceding and following generations,
63 ware davotad to tha Montenegrin prinea.4 Those who came before had been fiercely independent. Clan feeling -- and
feuding — predominated. Those who followed were "colorless and impersonable servants of the new Yugoslav regime" which
replaced Djilas' father's generation while the latter were still in their prime. Djilas calls his homeland a "society which disappeared as its members devoured one another. "5
In Montenegro, "war was survival, a way of life, and death in battle the loveliest dream and highest glory." Even "children of fourteen Cran3 to battle while their elders watched. "6 in DjilaH's book, the "symbolic functions of communication" of the Annales model are especially noteworthy. He weaves a bloody metaphor throughout his work: "It seems to me that I was born with blood on my eyes. My first sight was of blood. My first words were blood and bathed in blood." He writes of "bloody and chilling scenes which memory cannot banish, "7 of the "blood enmity" between Montenegrins and Moslems and the "bloody activity" that began between them every spring; 8 of blood revenge, personal, racial and political. To the Balkan mountaineers, the word "blood' had two-edged significance: "Blood ties" bound the generations of clans and families just as "blood feuds" tore them apart. Once the Great Har of 1875-1877 ended, migrant tribes and clans mixed, and by the time of the Balkan Wars national consciousness had flowered. Guerrillas took to the woods
64 s
during World War I. Their cause became more confused as
their homeland suffered defeats, and they were often indistinguishable from brigands.
Djilas recalls but one lone and misunderstood socialist
In thai* early yatri, whoie word* "cut like sabers. "9 Only
a few towns and merchants appeared after 1878 in Djilas'
peasant-populated Montenegro. The townsfolk and peasants
"differed more in what they wanted than in what they
wars. "10
He writes: "The roots from which a human creature
arises are many and entangled. .. .Man' s world is one of
becoming. "11 The Balkan peasants' complex past, "stormy,
shifting" present and uncertain future give the wars
temporal and spacial perspective. Torn away from the frame
of Balkan civiliztion, the incredible violence was and
remains incomprehensible. Djilas saw but could not accept a
"centuries-old inborn hatred against the Turks," which his
father, not without shame, viewed as culminating in "an
inevitable war of annihilation, begun long ago between two
faiths. "12
An Elite Perspective
Proceeding from personal to impersonal observations.
The—Times of London serves as an excellent source for the historian to gain a European perspective on the wars for it
reports what educated West Europeans thought of these events. Their views take on a special import as a backdrop
65 to Lenin's reaction to the same events. A few sample
passages reveal latent concerns. Unless there was territory
or influence to be gained, the Great Powers' interest was in maintaining the status quo . In January 1912, The Times
reported a "total absence of security of life and property;
...lawlessness prevails on every side" in the Macedonian
interior. 13
Though one article mentioned the "deplorable condition
of the subject races of Turkey", they were a concern more
because of being "a menace to the general peace." The
Powers' "indulgent forbearance" toward Turkey, the paper
admonished, had gone too far. 14 European "Oriental"
prejudice, pervasive in these reports, had a self-serving
purpose. "The Turk, always an alien and a taskmaster in the
European lands he had dominated tor five centuries, had at
last been expelled from Europe. "15 What the European
capitalists did not want was to have to face a reinvigorated Ottoman Empire.
Lenin's Assessment
Lenin responded with contempt to articles such as these. He believed that the European press used "ringing phrases", "designed to distract" and cover up "capitalist machinations" when reporting on the Balkans because they had the same financial interests as the Great Powers.
Instead of exposing the policy of the Great Powers, the newspapers - both conservative and liberal, [the latter being more subtleJ - are engaged in
bb discussing how best to help the sharks have their fill through this policy.... The man in the street does not suspect that he is being led by the
nose. ( 16)
Lenin's conception of the Balkan Mars was based on his
paradigm of war as a process of social structuring and
restructuring, as a phenomenon carried on by a specific
class for its own set of economic goals. He castigated the
European diplomats and press for weaving a "dense web oi
intrigue. . .in an el fort to obscure the meaning of the
procin ai a wholB" Lmy tmphaiiij.17 The meaning was, for him, the class nature of war.
The rush of "Pan-Slavic" sympathy for the Balkan Slavs
apparent in the Russian liberal press, the Cadet Rech , was in Lenin's eyes a front for purely bourgeois Russian interests. "CTrue3 democrats will never stand for the Slav as such being contrasted with the Turk, whereas one should
contrast the Slav and Turkish peasant, together , with the
- Slav and Turkish landlords and bashi bazouks . " IB Although
Lenin was not then opposed to national liberation, he viewed it as incomplete -- a partial measure of freedom. On Nov. 7, 1912, he wrote:
Bourgeois newspapers from Novove Vremva to Rech are talking oi national liberation in the Balkans, leaving out economic liberation. Yet in reality it is the latter that is the chiet thing. Given complete liberation from the landlords and from absolutism, national liberation and complete self- determinism of the peoples would be an inevitable result. LSuch liberation, it achieved instead by resolution would have costJ a hundred times less in human lives than the present war. (19)
D i Lenin often spoke in this way of liberation of the
"peoples". Their lot was basically the sane no matter under
what flag or religion they lived and fought for. He argued
that liberation must be won from the vestiges of feudalism
and monarchic absolutism, but economic liberation achieved
under socialism was Lenin's ultimate goal for the Balkans.
His sardonic response to a defense of Balkan war aims by the
St. Petersburg City Council in the name of "liberty":
Never and nowhere has "liberty' been won through one people waging war against one another. Wars between peoples merely ensure the enslavement of peoples. Real liberty for the Slav peasant in the Balkans, as well as for the Turkish peasant, can be ensured only by complete liberty inside every country and by a federation of completely and thoroughly democratic states. (20)
Lenin several times suggested that formation of a united Balkan federal republic "would have meant truly rapid, extensive and free development." But since it was the Balkan bourgeoisie, "afraid of real freedom", which locally guided the wars, nationalistic aims "overcame any feeling of affinity the downtrodden populace might have had for on* another. "21 While recognizing that, in the absence of a well-developed proletariat, his program was the only acheivable policy in the Balkans at the time, still Lenin's desire for socialist revolution and genuine freedom remained. But the Balkan proletariat had only marginal class consciousness with weak party leadership "ill-equipped to challenge the liberal patronage of aelf -determination. "22
6B Reports of massacres ot Turkish peasants in the face of
Bulgarian machine guns and similar atrocities underline the
relevance of Lenin's appraisal. Trotsky reported such
incidents in his war correspondent memoirs, The Balkan Mars .
Once tree of Bulgarian censorship, he castigated the Bulgarian "democratic" intelligentsia for at minimum
collaborating with the censors, but he reserved special
disdain for the Russian press "tor its conspiracy of silence
about the atrocities by the Slavs... and for trumpeting
sensationalist accounts of Turkish atrocities against the
Christians. "23 Lenin, too, accused the Balkan belligerents
of trying to deceive correspondents like Trotsky, and of not
allowing them to witness battles. 24
The Times of London printed at least one painfully
explicit letter-to-the-editor decrying charges and counter-
charges of atrocities when the real issue was urgently
needed relief for the suffering — "Bulgars, Serbs, Turks
. CalikeJ. . . "25 For Lenin the suffering was not the issue but merely a symptom.
Economic Development in the Balkans
Historical accounts reinforce Lenin's charge that the
bourgeois wars did not bring "economic liberation", though
the definition of the latter is of course debatable. Living
conditions urban and rural were miserable both before and after the wars. Even the original wars of "national liberation" in the 1870s, from which emerged independent and
69 autonomous Serbia, Romania, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, and
formed the foundation for the modern Balkan state system,
brought only superficial changes. 26 In 1912-13, the
"national liberation" war cry again included no substantial
social or economic improvements. The Balkans were still
agrarian economies, but in flux — disturbed by constant
uncertainties and violence. A small percentage of the few
men of property dominated; corruption was rife; the young
governments, inexperienced in finance, were heavily indebted
over foreign loans. For the few workers, working conditions
were bad with long hours and low wages. Food and housing
were deplorable, though town dwellers lived somewhat better
than rural peasants. Agriculture was backward, available
land scarce due to excessive sub-dividing, and
industrialization weak and inadequate. 27
In this agrarian part of the world, capitalism brought
in by the Great Powers did not have the cultural, economic
and psychological base in which to take root easily. So
initially it was essentially a force for disruption, more
readily revealing class difference, foreign, domineering,
augmenting the social chaos in a land where chaos was
endemic. Because of communism's links with the social and
economic values of the past, of the long duree . the communist parties were able to carry out development in a society torn between modern and premodern eras.
Workers' movements in the few scattered pockets of
70 industry began to organize in the Balkans just before the
turn of the century, but serious theoretical differences
splintered the party cells, a problem which plagued
socialism all over Europe, not just in the Eastern part.
Workers did, however, play an important role in the
intellectual-led Social-Democrat parties. Historians
Dimitrye Djordjevic and Stephan Fischer-Galafi, who have
studied Balkan revolutionary movements, write:
The aspiration of the workers' movements were closely related to the national liberation movements in the Balkans, as the socialists advocated self-determination and sought to connect
social revolution with national emancipation. ( 28)
In this, the Balkan socialists would have been following
Lenin's precept. In view, however, of the essential weakness
of the proletarians as a class in predominantly agrarian
Eastern Europe, Arno Mayer's appraisal may be closer to reality:
. . .Many East European Socialists were only half- hearted in their commitment to national regeneration. These Socialists kept warning that the class struggle was in danger of being completely subordinated to the nationalist struggle; accordingly they accused the bourgeoisie of exploiting the emotional appeal of the patriotic slogans in order to check the forces of progress. (29)
Lenin and Self -Determination
Lenin knew that the politically conscious portion of the proletariat was too small to have much impact and emphasized the "weakness, disunity, immaturity and ignorance of the peasant masses ".30 Therefore, he lauded the
71 "
quadruple alliance of Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and
Greece, which, although built of monarchies and borne of
war, not revolution, was nonetheless "a great step" toward
the elimination of feudalism. 31 Arno Mayer suggests that
Lenin's "all-out sponsorship of self-determination" had
repercussions in two directions. First, by positing "the
right of national self-determination as a universal
principle", 32 Lenin led President Noodrow Wilson to embrace
the concept, the latter linking it with disarmament, in his
effort to forge a new kind of peace as embodied in the
League of Nations. Lenin did not, of course, agree with
Wilson's ideas, which he viewed as a more subtle form of
imperialism, "pacification of the masses, nice phrases, semi-reforms, semi-concessions.
Second, Lenin "established the inextricable connection
between the national movements and the class struggle". 33
Thus, he brought about the accusation from socialist Rosa
Luxemburg, with "considerable justification", Mayer adds,
that Bolshevik support for self-determination in effect
"strangled" the Russian Revolution as well as providing "the
plans for settling the entire crisis arising out of the World War." 3 * Indeed, "Lenin soon discovered that Wilson's daring proposal for orderly change became the most decisive challenge to his own revolutionary ideology." But he continued his unqualified support for national self- determination "primarily", writes Mayer, "because he was
72 convinced that the war would compel both the Dual Monarchy
and the Russian Empire to surrender to the force of
nationalism. "35 He also looJced beyond Europe to see truly
radical implications of self-determination that Wilson
ignored or gave little attention.
Notes to Chapter Four
lEdward C. Thaden, Russia and the Balkan Alliance of 1912 (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Press, 1965), p. 38.
2 Charles and Barbara Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States. 1BQ4-192Q . Vol. Villi A History of East Central Europe , ed. by Peter F. Sugar and Donald F. Treadgold (11 vols.; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977), pp. 216-217.
3Milovan Djilas, Land Without Justice , intro. and notes by William Jovanovich (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, Inc., 1958), pp. 41-42.
4 Ibid. , p. 35.
5 Ibid. , p. 168.
6 lbid . . pp. 37-39.
7 Ibid . . p. 8.
Slbid. , p. 24.
9 Ibid . , pp. 229-230.
lO lbid . . pp. 156, 160.
Hlbid. , pp. 28-29.
12lbid. , pp. 205, 207.
13"The Balkan Danger," The Times (London), Jan. 18, 1912, p. 5.
73 l*Ibid-
15"The Second Balkan War," The Times (London), Oct. 23, 1913, p. 7.
l^Lenin, "The International Policy of the Bourgeoisie," XXXVI, Collected Works , pp. 228-229.
17l,enin, "Events in the Balkans and in Persia," XV, Collected Works (October 16, 1908), p. 221.
ISLenin, "Cadets and Nationalists," XVIII, Collected Works , pp. 397-399.
19Lenin, "The Social Significance of the Serbo- Bulgarian Victories," XVIII, Collected Works , pp. 397-399.
20Lenin, "A Disgraceful Resolution," XVIII, Collected Works . p. 353.
ZlLenin, "The Balkan War and Bourgeois Chauvinism," XIX, Collected Works , p. 39. 22 Mayer, Wilson vs Lenin . pp. 380-381.
23 Leon Trotsky, The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky:
The Balkan Wars. 1912-1913 . trans, by Brian Pearce, ed. by George Weissman and Duncan Williams with intro. by George Weissman (New York i Pathfinder Press, 1980), pp. xvii-xviii.
24Lenin, "The Horrors of War," XVIII, Collected Works (October B, 1912), pp. 372-373.
25"Balkan Atrocities and Balkan Distress," The Times (London), Sept. 2, 1913, p. 5.
26Jelavich, pp. 141,170,205.
7 2 lbid . . pp. 203, 322-323.
28Dimitrye Djordjevic and Stephen Fischer-Galati , The Balkan Revolutionary Tradition (New York; Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 205.
2 9Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin , p. 381.
30Lenin, "Social Significance of the Serbo-Bulgarian Victories," XVIII, Collected Works , p. 398.
3lLenin, "A New Chapter in World History," XVIII, Collected Works , pp. 368-369.
74 32Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin , pp. 298-299.
33 lbid .
34 lbid . , p. 302.
3 5 Ibid. / p. 367, 301.
Chapter 5 — War as "The Spark"
The Centrality of World War I in Lenin's Theory
Lenin developed his analysis of war in the midst of a
growing social crisis in Europe. His vision of the roots of
war in the class system sharpened as the years progressed
and the crisis deepened. In 1915 he explained how witnessing
these events affected his own perception:
The experience of the war, like the experience of any crisis in history, of any great calamity and any sudden turn in human life, stuns and breaks some people, but enlightens and tempers others . Taken by and large, and considering the history of the world as a whole, the number and strength of the second kind of people have — with the exception of individual cases of the decline and fall of one state or another -- proved greater than those of the former kind. (1)
Lenin was one of the "second kind of people." His
personal "enlightenment" about war evolved from 1905 and intensified in 1915 when he had to find answers which
"classical Marxism" had not provided. He wrote a year after
the outbreak of the war that to make the deceptions of the
Great Powers clear to the petty bourgeois, "it is sometimes
75 necessary to go with them to the battleground, and be able
to wait until they have been sobered by the experience of
war. "2 Certainly this is what happened to the war poets. It
is vividly evident, for example, in the memoirs of Robert
Graves and Siegfried Sassoon. Though they were not
radicalized as Lenin expected the oppressed classes in all
the belligerent nations would be, even these members of the
more privileged classes, and increasing numbers like them,
gradually lost their belief in the war and questioned its meaning.
The majority of the socialists abandoned the revolution
for nationalism and the majority of the masses long
continued to fight the war for the imperialists. Sassoon
wrote, for example, that "it was queer how the men seemed to
take their victimization for granted." 3 Lenin countered his
miscalculation of the level of revolutionary consciousness
among the socialists and the masses in two typical ways:
philosophical study and unceasing polemic against the
socialists who decided to support the war effort. He had
long, by virtue of his exile, had an armchair perspective on
the prospects of social revolution. The significance of World War I as part of his own personal history, a period
through which he lived, is key to understanding the changes
in his central analytical concepts. Though Lenin never fought in the trenches, seeing the exhausted, wounded and beaten men, the long lines for dwindling food supplies, the
76 6
angry strikes and mutinies made him realize that conditions
were ripe for radical social change.
In 1905, when the socialist revolution he expected
failed to materialize, Lenin studied the Paris Commune of
March IB to May 29, 1871. Its fatal mistake, he wrote in
1908, was in "combining contradictory tasks — patriotism
and socialism."* Following the Franco-Prussian War, the
bourgeoisie "launched an attack to wrest the arms that
terrified it from the hands of the Paris proletariat." The
proletariat, while replying to this with the Commune and
civil war, did not carry that war far enough because of a
"naive belief" in "common national aims" with the
bourgeoisie. 5 They were "blinded by patriotic illusions...",
listening to the bourgeois lament, 'The Fatherland is in
danger.'" Lenin then admonished fellow socialists that they
should not make the same mistake of confusing fighting for a
republic for fighting for socialism.
But in 1915, Lenin wrote that the "objective
conditions" for socialism had not yet materialized in
nineteenth century France, thus the downfall of the Commune
could be attributed to an immature proletariat. There was
"no modern imperialism; [there were} no mass socialist
parties in any of the belligerent countries. ..." 7
His study of Marx in July 1914 gave him a better
perspective on Marx's view of the epochs of history. In an article written in 1915 he discussed Marx's diagnosis of a n )
conflict, an example of "defense of the fatherland" such as
his opponents often invoked. One must notice, Lenin wrote,
that "Marx was working on the problem when there existed
indubitably progressive bourgeois movements...." Each
conflict, he insisted, has to be evaluated in its unique
concrete circumstances, studying the "nexus between events"
to determine which class's interests were being sought or
met. S Though the observer could not know the strength or
pattern of development of a given social movement, he could
know "which class stands at the hub of one epoch or another,
determining its main content. "9 One must look at European
policy as a whole rather than wrenching an example, e.g. of
war, out of its social, political and economic context. 10
This also shows the influence of Clausewitz, whom he studied at this juncture.
No longer was Lenin critical of the Communards:
The war of 1870-71 was a continuation of the progressive bourgeois policy (which had been pursued for decades) of liberating and uniting Germany. The debacle and overthrow of Napoleon III hastened that liberation. The peace programme of the socialists of that epoch took this result into account and advocated support for the democratic bourgeoisie, urging no plunder of France and an honorable peace with the republic... At that time, the programme of a democratic (bourgeois) peace had an objective historical basis. Now there is no such basis. ...( 11
Instead of the Communards, Lenin directed vehement criticism toward the socialists of the Second International who had abandoned international socialism for nationalism.
?B He aimed his attack in particular at Karl Kautsky, a
respected German Marxist and a leader of the large groups of
socialists who sought reform, rather than revolution,
through their own set of progressive war aims. Tuchman
explains that "on paper revolution had a lovely glow; the reality in the streets was less welcome. "12 The collapse of
the Second International formally meant the end of
communication among the socialists of the belligerents.
Lenin said this revealed their true sentiment: social
chauvinism. 13 He reminded them that in the 1912 Basle
Manifesto, put together by many of these same socialists,
the conclusion was that in a war fought for profit and
ambition rather than "in the interests of the people, ...it
would be a crime to fire at one another. "14 The socialists'
task, as Lenin saw it, was to turn imperialist war into
civil war, i.e. fuel the revolutionizing spark which the
former kind of war would inevitably ignite. He emphasized,
however, that it was "impossible to make a revolution — it
grows out of a multiplicity of diverse phenomena, phases,
traits, characteristics, consequences of the imperialist war. "15 But he roundly criticized Kautsky' s reasoning about
the need for national defense as, he pointed out, Clausewitz had ridiculed a similar idea long ago. And that idea, as Lenin paraphrased it, was "that when war breaks out all historically created political relations between nations and classes cease, and that a totally new situation arises! "16
79 Polish Marxist LeszeJc Kolalcowski avers that "Lenin was
the first and only important leader of social democracy in
Europe to proclaim the slogan of revolutionary defeatism:
the proletariat in each country should endeavor to bring
about the military defeat of its own government. ... "17 Lenin
was never against war per se in the pacifist sense. He saw
the imperialist war as a necessary step toward socialism, "a
meaningful part of the historical process which would lead
to a 'clearer revolutionary understanding' "18 because the
imperialist war was being transformed by social crisis into
what he expected would be civil war. Thus he pressed for
military defeat of the imperialist powers. As Lenin
witnessed in Russia in 1905, military defeat tremendously
weakened the oppressive social structure he sought to destroy.
The Pre-War Mentalite
Roland Stromberg contends that although public opinion
did not start the war, "the incredible endurance of the
soldiers CandJ the cooperation of the entire community down to 1917, at least ,.. .prolonged Cit3..."19 The overwhelming majority of the intellectual Left in Europe — poets, novelists, scientists, socialists, artists, etc. — were pro-war in 1914. It is difficult to imagine the naivite of the pre-1914 generation of youth which thought of war as
"a cleansing fire. "20 one of the most significant elements
80 t
of the pre-war mentalite was the "thirst for community. " A
sense of belonging "suddenly reappeared with the shock of
the war.... "21 While much serious thought in the period from
1890 to 1914 was so-called "modernist" — "defiant of
tradition, consciously iconoclastic, deeply personal", there
was another facet which "worried about the decay of le sens
social, . the loss of Gemeinschaf " the uprootedness and
alienation of urbanized industrial society. 22 i n Russia, it was for some the search for sobornost . that peculiarly
Russian sense of spiritual solidarity connected with the
common belief in achievement of salvation through suffering.
In Germany the Jug-endbewcruna was a youth movement which took
up communalism, getting back to nature, unconventional
sexual morality, mistrust of the older generation, and
protest against "false" education in which they saw the
intellect as the enemy of culture and soul. 23 For many
throughout Europe, nationalism replaced religious feeling.
For those who had enjoyed materialist ease, the danger,
sacrifice, "even death on the battlefield" fulfilled a
"search for something noble. "24 There was the underlying
"assumption that from the ashes something new and better would arise.... "25
But the data did not fit the paradigm. The "exultation of the August days of 1914" turned to the revulsion of 1917-
1918,26 a revulsion which pervaded much of society at all levels and stirred a crisis which brought forth new ideas
81 J
and images, new ways of seeing oneself and one's
environment. Lenin, however, had already found the
philosophical answers he required.
Lenin Returns to Hegel
Faced with the collapse of the Second International,
Lenin sought philosophical answers to this crisis by
studying G.W.F. Hegel as he had previously studied Marx. His
Philosophical Notebooks , the majority of which date from
1914-1915, mark his fundamental reappraisal of Hegel's
dialectics. "...[Having become] convinced that action must
be guided by theory, that reality and its laws must be
correctly reflected and understood if action is to be
successful, CLenin feltJ the necessity of developing and
deepening his theoretical framework." 27 Historian David
McLellan writes that: "In his early years as a Marxist,
Lenin did not believe that Marxism required a specifically
philosophical component, ... Cand thought of dialectics as
'a relic of Hegelianism. ' "28 His revolutionary activities up
till then had taken the form of tactics without theoretical
substance, working for social changes without thinking
through the prerequisites for change. He changed his mind about the need for philosophy during his Siberian exile when he read the works of Marxist leader Georgi H. Plekhanov, but did not yet take up such discussion himself. Indeed, in his
Materialism and Empiriocriticism he sought "not to join
di. together the issues ot philosophy and. politics, hut rather
to separate them" in order to assert his authority against
the Mensheviks. 29 But the advent ot the war and, in
particular, the demise ol the Second international, caused
him to "reorient his perspective."-30 As the reader
progresses through the nearly 300 pages ot Lenin's
Notebooks, particularly his study of Hegel's Logic, his
perception ot Hegel's thought seems suddenly illumined. in
the beginning sharply critical, seeing idealism as a
"sterile t lower that grows on the living tree o± 31 ...objective, absolute tcnowledge" , he begins to see Hegel in a new way.
...The practice ot man and ot mankind is the test, the criterion ot the objectivity ot cognition. is that Hegel's ideaV it is necessary to return to this. .. .Undoubtedly in Hegel practice serves as a link in the analysis ot the process ot cognition, and indeed as the transition to the objective. . .truth. Marx, consequently, clearly sides with Hegel in introducing the criterion ot
practice into the theory ot knowledge. ( 32)
in other words, man's action (praxis) is the check or
test of that which he perceives, i.e. the reflection ot
nature or the objective world in his mind.-33 However, "the
mind is not merely a passively reflecting mirror but an
active agent. "34 That is, knowledge has a dual aspect ot
reflection and creation ot nature. These two opposites evolve in a constant struggle, as they unity, split, create and recreate, develop. "LLeninJ emphasizes the reiatedness and dynamics ot ail things. Negation is not so much a law as
33 a 'moment' or stage of connection, of development, which
preserves the positive element of what is created. 35 "The
truth manifests itself only as the process of the resolution
of contradictions. "36 This is the essence of Hegel's
dialectics as Lenin interpreted it.
All of this is central to Lenin's thinking on war. What
he found in Hegel was not a one-sided idealism, but a theory
which incorporated both the ideal and the material, leading
Lenin to the conclusion that historical change takes place
both in the material world through man's action and in the
mind through man's perception. "Intelligent idealism," Lenin
wrote, "is closer to intelligent materialism than stupid materialism. "37
This concept of dialectical interaction helped Lenin
satisfactorily explain why the socialists supported the
bourgeois class not only in developing countries seeking
national liberation but in imperialist countries as well. He saw this "social chauvinism" as a temporary result of
"false consciousness." Though these socialists may
temporarily unify or become "identical" with bourgois class
interests, this is "conditional, transitory. "38 Philosopher Richard T. DeGeorge, in his book Soviet Patterns of Thought , clarifies Lenin's notion of error in man's thinking.
...Since it is the mind which abstracts and produces the universal, ...it is possible for man to abstract incorrectly, to falsify, and to introduce freedom of thought or fancy It is this, ultimately, which makes flights of fancy,
84 false ideologies and alienation possible. (39)
The social chauvinists' actions were guided not just by
Marxian tactics, but by their own theoretical perceptions
and misperceptions. Lenin presumed to know and correctly
understand the Marxian "laws" which his fellow socialists
did not.
Lenin's interpretation of Hegel's dialectic, verifying
the possibility that man could change his world, gave him the philosophical underpinning to take action , as he did in
1917 in Russia, rather than wait for change to evolve. In
his "Conspectus of Hegel's Science of Logic", Lenin
acknowledged the ideal aspect of the dialectic in
paraphrasing Hegel "that it is customary in history to quote
anecdotes as the minor 'causes' of major events t when J in
fact thesu are only occasions, only [external events], which
'the inner spirit of the event would not have required. ' "40
World War I had just such an "inner spirit" which Lenin saw
as enlightened class consciousness born of a crisis with
dimensions previously unknown. Both the material action and
the inner spirit became part of Lenin's model of social transformation.
Lenin Connects the Concepts of Imperialism and War
In 1916, Lenin wrote Imperialism. The Highest Stage of
Capitalism. Imperialism as a concept was not Lenin's
B5 original idea, nor did he claim it to be. He borrowed from
and acknowledged his debt to others. One was English
liberal J. A. Hobson, "who Cin 19023 had claimed that
colonial expansion was due to a lack of home investment
opportunities." Another significant theorist in this regard
was Rudolf Hilferding, an Austro-Marxist who formulated the
concept of the monopoly of "finance-capital" in 1910, and
described its devastating effects on the world market
leading ultimately to revolutionary war by the
proletariat. 41 His analysis, quoted by Lenin, evokes the
image of material life similarly portrayed by Braudel and the Annales : "The age-long agrarian isolation of 'nations
without history' is destroyed and they are drawn into the
capitalist whirlpool. Capitalism itself provides the
subjugated with the means and resources for their emancipation. "42 Dialectics gave Lenin the tool with which to elaborate his social model. As "development is the struggle of opposites", so economic and political
development are the struggle of opposing classes.
Rosa Luxemburg, a prominent Polish-German socialist and
leader, along with Karl Liebnicht, of the left-wing Spartacus League, connected militarism exclusively to
imperialism and the colonial expansion the latter required. That expansion would eventually reach an impasse and lead to an automatic breakdown of the imperialist economy. This, of course, conflicted with Lenin's view of "extreme unevenness"
86 in the collapse of capitalism leading to protracted wars.
Lenin thus wrote many pages criticizing Luxemburg's views.
He referred, for example, to the "vain yearning for the
destruction of capitalism without a desperate civil war or
series of wars. "43 in 1916 in response to Luxemburg's
"Junius Pamphlet", Lenin averred that it is a false idea that there can be no wars but reactionary ones. "LThis3 gives rise to the absurd idea of 'disarmament. '.. .It also
gives rise to... the attitude of indifference to national
movements." Again he emphasized the need for analysis of each specific situation, in World War I the "correct
solution LbeingJ not just class struggle but civil war. "44 And he wrote in 1917 that there can be no disarmament until there is a socialist world, not just a socialist country. 45 Luxemburg thought that any war, even if it began as a national one, would become imperialist. While "not denying the possibilty of all transformations in general," Lenin stood by his advocacy of the right to national self-
determination for countries not yet ready for socialism. 46
Every war is the continuation of politics by other means. The continuation of national liberation politics in the colonies will inevitably take the form of national liberation wars against imperialism The imperialist "epoch" by no means precludes national wars on the part of... small (annexed or nationally oppressed) countries against the imperialist powers just as it does not preclude large-scale national movements in Eastern Europe.
Many different kinds of revolts, therefore, fell into
87 Lenin's category of "just" struggles for national self-
determination. Mayer suggests that the concept of self-
determination was "the political extension of Lenin's
primarily economic analysis of imperialism. "48
Russian Bolshevik: Nikolai Bukharin also greatly
influenced Lenin through his Imperialism and the World
Economy which extended Hilferding's ideas, suggesting that
"imperialism was a necessary feature of contemporary
capitalism and that it inevitably led to war and
revolution "49cmy emphasis}. Bukharin thought the reason for
this lay in the imperialist countries' inability to avoid
the internal stresses within the system of production,
especially in lesser developed areas of the world where they
could not bribe workers with higher wages. Lenin wrote the
introduction to Bukharin' s work, announcing the end of the era of "peaceful" capitalism.
In addition to being inspired by Bukharin, Hobson and
Hilferding and, in a critical sense, by Luxemburg, Lenin
wrote his tract to refute Karl Kautsky's concept of a benificent "ultraimperialism" which suggested capitalist powers might form some kind of international cartel to divide the world peacefully as it was not in their interest to carry on the arms race or wars. Kautsky's concept came from the same sort of wishful ideal which inspired Woodrow
Wilson's brand of international cooperation as espoused in the League of Nations. 50
ab •
"Lenin was scandalized by the idea of capitalism
without wars, a state of affairs in which revolutions, too,
would be much less likely. "51 He saw the division of the
world by the capitalist-turned-imperialist powers in a way
diametrically opposed to Kautsky's and Wilson's views. He
believed that because the world had begun an "age of
scarcity", 52 there would only be intensification of
competition for raw materials and a scramble for colonies to
protect the Great Powers' relative strength, and that
violence was the only possible result of the division and
subsequent redivisions of the world. 53 Any agreements would
necessarily be limited and temporary. He expected bitter
competition due to purported shortages in some raw
materials, the end of the free market and the proliferation
of industrial monopoly, and an active role played by
banks . 54
Lenin defined imperialism as the domination of finance
capital, both bank and industrial. It was not so much by
building empires, expropriating raw materials, or
controlling markets that the rich nations prevailed over the
poor; it was by "the export of capital itself. "55 Britain,
France, the United States and Germany issued loans in
exchange for favors like trade and security agreements. 56
These were the grist of the balance of power system.
Economic and political alliances connected in a striving for the twin goals of economic and territorial hegemony. 57
89 Lenin also assumed that the lure of high profit would
prevent the imperialist powers from using surplus capital to
raise the standard of living in backward, dependent
countries. In his mind "uneven development and wretched
conditions of the masses LwereJ the fundamental and
inevitable conditions and premises of this mode of production. "58
The degree of capitalist development in a given nation
varied throughout the world. Lesser developed nations,
Russia being Lenin's model, were characterized by a weak
indigenous bourgeoisie and a small proletariat. The
Russian peasantry, which Lenin saw in economically stratifed
layers, was the largest group. Its petit bourgeois sectors,
when joined with the proletariat, were more likely to become
a revolutionary class than the bourgeoisie because they had
a greater stake in land reform. Lenin's view of the role of
the peasantry in bringing about bourgeois revolution is a
significant divsersion from classical Marxism. One must keep
in mind that readiness for revolution required not just
industrial development but an ability to accept capitalist
methods and attitudes in the agrarian societies which
constituted most of the colonies and Great Power spheres of influence.
In Lenin's world view, no peaceful imperialist division
of the world, such as Kautsky suggested, was possible in part because uneven development created a disparity in the
30 relation of forces and their shares of profit and control.
The influence of the dialectic is visible in his description
of the "living connections" between imperialist peace and
war, both of which are a "striving for domination, not for
freedom. "59
"The diversion of capital t outside their borders, Lenin
believedJ, would result in industrial stagnation within the
wealthy nations and would create more tension between the
working and investing classes there. "60 In lesser developed
parts of the world, social change could take a very
different path. Indeed, because imperialist war both
enervated the foreign and indigenous bourgeoisies, while at
the same time radicalizing the proletariat and peasantry,
the latter groups could themselves throw off the vestiges of
feudalism. Lenin saw in 1905 that the Russian bourgeoisie
was incapable of carrying this out. But under the crisis
conditions of war, the lower classes could do so, and then
move on, depending on the strength of the socialist class
consciousness, to socialist revolution.
Sociologist David Lane writes that, in Lenin's view,:
Imperialism helps to explain why the revolution of the working class is postponed in advanced countries, why the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is reversed, and why the center of the revolutionary arena has moved to the developing countries. (61)
Lane posits three conclusions of the political developments stemming from Lenin's analysis of imperialism: 1) The
Ji economic benefits enjoyed by the masses of a rich
imperialist state help ensure their loyalty to the political
and economic system. 2) Working class consciousness is
further corrupted by struggles between imperialist
countries. They falsely see defense of the fatherland as
defense of their own interests. 3) The collapse of world
capitalism may begin in backward countries where there are
fewer possibilities to bribe workers and the bourgeoisie is
not as entrenched; i.e. "the imperialist chain might snap at
its weakest link. " 62
Lenin and the Deepening Crisis of 1917
During the revolutions and counterrevolutions of 1917,
Lenin saw even more clearly that the social character of the
war was changing. It cannot be denied that he saw a major
role for himself and his Bolshevik Party to help direct the
turmoil toward their socialist goal. He believed the
prospects for civil war to be at a peak in Russia as well
Germany. Those among the masses in Russia who expected the
February Revolution's Provisional Government to end the war
instead witnessed its extension. Those who expected
continuation of shared power between the Soviets and the bourgeoisie, the concept of "dual power", saw it threatened during the "July Days" and again during the attempt at counterrevolution by General Kornilov. Lenin and his party were able to capitalize on the resulting rise of discontent
92 "
in their attempt to teach the masses ahout the class nature
of war and the impossibility at achieving "a democratic,
non-coercive peace without overthrowing the power of capital
and transferring state power to... the proletariat. fe 3
Arno Mayer cogently points out how the issue of the
belligerents' true war aims, the product of the old system
of secret diplomacy, fuelled a crisis in 19^7-191B which
undermined the governments not just in tsarist Russia and
thereafter its Provisional Government, where revolution
actually took place, but also among the rest of the warring
nations. 6* As months passed and the Powers' continued to
refuse to disclose what they would require in terms of
peace, tensions heightened among the parties of order and
movement in France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Great
Britain. As the latter grew in strength, the established
governments could not afford to ignore them and still
maintain the political truce with which the war had begun.
Indeed, by 1917 the threat was not merely to the truce but
to the very structure and function of the governments
themselves. The overthrow of the Russian autocracy intensified the pressure by the parties of movement for internal reforms.
It was the Bolshevik Revolution, however, and its publication of a Decree On Peace revealing the contents of the secret Allied war aims agreements which widened the fissures in the balance of power system, presented the old
93 order with a vision of similar revolutions occuring
throughout Europe, and reinvigorated President Wilson's
advocacy of open diplomacy. Wilson believed that war fought
for expansionist aims would not be possible if the
permission of an electorate were a prerequisite. Thus he
echoed the old Enlightenment belief , carried on by the
liberal parties of movement, that only governments, not
people, fight wars. Lenin's class perspective, on the other
hand, led him to believe that people did fight wars, either
to protect or protest class privileges.
Notes to Chapter Five
^Lenin, "Opportunism and The Collapse of the Second International", XXI, Collected Works . (June 1915), p. 216.
2 Lenin, "The Social Chauvinists' Sophisms," XXI, Collected Works (May 1, 1915), p. 184.
3 Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1930), p. 120.
4Lenin, "Lessons of the Commune," Vol. XIII, Collected Works (March 23, 190B), p. 475.
5 Ibid . . p. 476-477.
6Lenin, XIII, Collected Works . (1908), quoted in Fischer, The Life of Lenin , p. 46.
7 Lenin, "Socialism and War," XXI, Collected Works (1915), p. 309.
SLenin, "Under a False Flag," XXI, Collected Works (February 1915), p. 140.
SLenin, Ibid . , p. 145.
94 lOLenin, "War and Revolution: A Lecture Delivered May 14, 1917," XXIV, Collected Works (May 1917), p. 401.
llLenin, "The Peace Programme," XXII, Collected Works (March 25, 1916), p. 163.
12iuchman, The Proud Tower , p. 439.
l 3Lenin, "Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International," XXI, Collected Works (June 1915), p. 207.
l* Ibid . , p. 439.
15Mayer, Wilson v. Lenin , p. 51.
IfcLenin, "Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International," XXI, (June 1915), p. 220.
17Kolalowski, p. 469.
ISRoland Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellect- uals and 1914 (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 19B2), p. 171.
19 lbid . . pp. 179-183.
20lbid. , p. 11.
21 lbid . . pp. 188-189.
22lbid. , p. 7.
23lbid. , pp. 9-10.
24Tuchman, The Proud Tower , p. 248. 25stromberg, Redemption by War , p. 12.
26 lbid . . p. 7.
27Richard T. DeGeorge, Patterns of Soviet Thought: The Origins and Development of Soviet Marxism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), p. 164.
2BDaVid McLellan, Marxism After Marx (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1979), p. 104
29 lbid . . p. 106.
30lbid. , p. 107.
95 3lLenin, "On the Question of Dialectics," XXXVIII, Collected Works (1915), p. 363.
32Lenin, "Conspectus of Hegel's Science of Logic," in
Philosophical Notebooks . XXXVIII, Collected Works . September -December 1914), pp. 211, 212.
3 3 Ibid. , p. 201.
34DeGeorge, p. 16B.
3 5 Ibid. , p. 167.
36Kolakowski, p. 463. O
37Lenin, "Conspectus of Hegel's Science of Logic, XXXVIII, Collected Works (September - December 1914), p. 276.
38Lenin, "On the Question of Dialectics," p. 360. 39 DeGeorge, p. 169.
40Lenin, "Conspectus...", p. 160.
41McLellan, p. 97. 42 Lenin, "Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, XXII, Collected Works (June 1916), p. 297.
* 3Lenin, "The Position and Tasks of the Socialist International," XXI, Collected Works (November 1, 1914), p. 40.
44Lenin, "The Junius Pamphlet," XXII, Collected Works (July 1916), pp. 312, 316-317.
* BLenin, "The Disarmament Slogan," XXIII, Collected
Works (1917) , p. 95. 46 Lenin, "The Junius Pamphlet," XXII, p. 309. 47 Ibid. , pp. 310-311.
48Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin , p. 298.
49McLellan, p. 97.
5 "McLellan, p. 28.
5lKolakowski, p. 492.
96 52Fischer, Life of Lenin , p. 97.
53Lenin in Henry M. Christman, ed. Essential Works of Lenin (New York: Bantam Books, 1966), p. 239.
54Lenin, "Imperialism...", XXII, p. 299.
55christman, Essential Works of Lenin , p. 177.
56 lbid . . p. 217-21B.
S7Lenin in Christman, p. 216.
58Lenin in Christman, p. 226.
59Lenin, "Imperialism...", XXII, pp. 295-297.
60chri&tman, Essential Works of Lenin , p. 177.
6lDavid Lane, Leninism: A Sociological Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 39.
6 2 ibid. , pp. 39-41.
63Lenin, "The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution: Draft Platform for the Proletarian Party.", XXIV, Collected Works (September 1917), p. 67.
64Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin , ff.
Chapter 6 --
War and Weltanschauungen —
An Historiographical Look at the Causes and Meanings of World War I
War and Peace as Tools of Policy
Lenin's ability to perceive and act in accord with the
social and economic changes wrought by total war assisted
his party's bid for power throughout 1917. Certainly the
97 Provisional Government, which was unable to break free of
the old commitments to the Allies, failed to see the potency
of peace as a political tool, and "failed to take account of
the ideological and power realities in revolutionary
Russia." 1 As Arno Mayer noted, "Lenin came to realize that
the war crisis might allow Russia to play leapfrog with history. .., "2 to telescope the bourgeois revolution into a few short months and to proceed with peacemaking and
industrializing under a proletarian regime led by its vanguard, the Bolsheviks. The war served as as the most effective instrument to quicken the pace of social change and development by rousing the masses from their generally habitual acceptance of the status quo . Thus Lenin could conceive of proletarian revolution before others thought the time was right. For Lenin, the key difference in Russia was that the crisis eliminated the need to await for the full maturation of capitalism, which would much more slowly reveal the meaning of the class struggle to the workers and peasants.
Just before the October revolution, Lenin related a story which illustrated his cognizance of the importance of the simple issues of in everyday life in their nexus with class consciousness as a most effective path to social, economic and political change:
After the July Days,... I was obliged to go underground. .. .In a small working-class house in. . .Petrograd, dinner is being served. The hostess
se puts bread on the table. The host says: "Look what fine bread. 'They' dare not give us bad bread now. And we had almost given up thinking that we'd ever get good bread in Petrograd again. " 1 was amazed at this class appraisal of the July Days. My thoughts had been revolving around the political significance of those events, .. .analyzing the situation which caused this zigzag in history .. .and how we ought to change our slogans and alter our Party apparatus. .. .As for bread, I, who had not known want, did not give it a thought. I took bread for granted. . . . LBut J this member of the oppressed class. . .[took J the bull by the horns with that astonishing simplicity and straightforwardness, with that firm determination and amazing clarity of outlook from which we intellectuals are as remote as the stars in the sky. (3)
Lenin's understanding of this Hestian element of history led to a new slogan used for the first time that same day,
October 1, 1917; "Power to the Soviets, Land to the
Peasants, Peace to the Nations, Bread to the Starving!" 4
Bad bread could not bring revolution by itself (the legendary consequences for Marie Antoinette notwithstanding!). It was a sign of the permeation of everyday material life by the devastating effects of the war. It raised the consciousness of the masses. But of greatest signii icance was their growing awareness that the countless lives in this war were being lost not for freedom or other ideals but for "the right to plunder other nations." The Bolshevik Party and its Decree on Peace at
Brest Litovsk made this very clear.
Peace was the focal point of Lenin's revolutionary strategy, an immediate peace to be concluded together with the Allies if possible, but separately if necessary. This
J 9 "
call for peace would, the Bolsheviks hoped, not only give
the new Russian socialist state time to establish itself,
but also, by publishing the belligerents' secret treaties,
begin European-wide civil war. With "Peace, Bread and Land",
the Bolsheviks "sought to win over the tired soldiers,...
the disgruntled nationalities, .. .the land- and peace-hungry
peasantry. 5
Lenin's theory of war was profoundly reshaped by World
War 1. This paper has discussed its evolution up until the
time of the inception ot the first socialist state. The
October Revolution marks the natural boundary between, for
Lenin, theory and praxis. With characteristic pragmatism, he viewed any necessary dispensation of his earlier theories as art. He soon realized that the Soviet state was too weak
to press for European revolution at the likely expense of
its own. War, like peace, is, however, a tool of revolutionary art as well as theory, and Lenin's understanding of that basic social reality carried him into the task of building and controlling what was now being called "Communism". Before turning to final conclusions, once again a comparative historiographical discussion helps put Lenin's views in clearer focus.
Inter-War and Contemporary Historiographical Perspectives
In the immediate years following the war, the issue of war guilt was the topical focus of the histories and
100 memoirs. The Treaty of Versailles assigned this guilt and
consequent reparations to Germany and her allies. But gradually emerging revelations of the secret documents of all the .belligerents -- previous suppressed or partially censored memoranda, telegraph messages and other diplomatic correspondence — provided plenty ot data which the writers used, depending on their political perspective, to turn blame away from or upon their nation. The general conclusion was that though underlying causes existed, individuals actually started the hostilities. Thus analysis and assessment of blame began with examinations of their written records. The national origins of most of these early histories contrasts with the international approach of the
Annales .
American historian Sidney Bradshaw Fay's The Origins of the World Mar , published in 1930, contains a good discussion of the war guilt controversy which followed Versailles and carried on through the inter-war years. in light ot the newly disclosed documents. Fay contended that historians must fix responsibility tor the war on all its participants, not just the defeated ones. Fay recognized a series ot "underlying causes" ot the war: the secret alliance system, militarism, nationalism, the newspaper press, and economic imperialism. The latter, Fay wrote, tended to become exaggerated as a cause "in the mind of the public because it is a subject which touches the poclcets of
101 wide classes. ... "6 It is evident that his understanding ot
cause was stiii very much grounded in the actions ot the
diplomats as he went on to write:
But it one reads the diplomatic correspondence ot the years before the War, one is struck by the relatively slight importance which is given to these economic rivalries.... It is not so much questions ot economic rivalry as those ot prestige, boundaries, armies and navies, the Balance of Power, and possible shit tings in the system of alliances which provoke reams of diplomatic correspondence and raise the temper in Foreign Offices to the danger point. (7)
Fay also gave primacy to the jingoistic tone ot the press which enf lamed enthusiasm tor war among its readers, a
situation within which, he notes, governments had little
control whether or not they were pleased by the coverage.
After delineating the underlying causes listed above,
Fay returns to the assassination ot Franz Ferdinand, and through that act, the forceful cause ot Serbian nationalism, as the factor which had "consolidated the elements ot hostility...." Without this catalyst, Fay was "very doubtful
LthatJ these dangerous tendencies would have actually led to war . ..." 8
French historian Pierre Renouvin wrote a critical study of the war in 192B based on lectures delivered at the
Sorbonne in 1922-1923 and under the auspices ot the French
Society of War History. The Society, founded in 1918, sought an objective analysis ot the war guilt question through available documentary evidence. Henouvm saw an underlying
1U2 war mentality which ran through the pre-war governments, hut
particularly Germany and Austria, and in the final analysis
he absolved the Entente. To assign responsibility tor war,
Kenouvin averred, one must look hack lurther than the events
immediately preceding its outbreak, tor by then the
decisions had already been made. He suggested that the
combination or factors of the mentality o± inevitable war,
the arms race, and the rivalry ol the two groups influenced
the actions oi the political leaders. 9 Combined with this
background, "in any diplomatic crisis", certain "ieelings"
and "forces" determine action! "mutual suspicion", the
"entangling complications oi alliances", the influence of military leadership and the exigencies of their war plans. 10
The "germs of conflict already existed in Europe, LbutJ was
there not, LHenouvin askedJ, someone who struck the
spark?" 11
These two examples of inter-war historiography show how the actions of individuals, the dependence on documentary evidence, and the desire to assign guilt characterized the beginning of the search for the causes of the first total war.
Contemporary historians have had seventy years now to reconstruct the war and its meaning not only to that generation but to future ones. it is thus useful tor comparison to see how the benefits of that hindsight reflect
1UJ in the historiography ot the war. Both the phenomena they
analyze and that which they play down or do not consider are
of interest. For the purposes or this paper, only a very
oriel scan ol some ol the literature is possible.
Some ol the historians ol World War 1, in their search
far determinants, continue to locus on the government and
military elite and its strategic and ideological
assumptions. Historian Paul Kennedy, editor of a collection
of essays on the Great Powers' war plans, points out the
pervasive "dislike ol compromise and desire for 'total'
solutions" among the belligerents which would lead to their dismal failures in projection of the course of the war.
Counting on the capacity of the railways and the
industrialized state to mobilize millions, Field Marshall von Molttce (the elder) expected the war "would be decided within weeks if not days of its opening."-'"'
There were no defensive strategies because they were not wanted; there were no alternatives, because inflexibility was as much in the mind as it was in the railway timetable; there were r- schemes for stalemate or compromise, because a swift and absolute victory was what was demanded; and there was little civilian control over the military because very often they both had the same objective
and shared a common ideology. ( 13)
Kennedy's thesis is that "only in the German plan did mobilization mean war," therefore the Russian decision to mobilize was "one ot the most lateiul acts in the drama;" the Schiielten Flan pinned hopes on defeating the French before the Russians had mobilized to avoid a two-lront war.
1U4 Thus, writes Kennedy, Germany opened hostilities as a result
of Russia's decree. 14 This lack of German strategic options
Kennedy attributes to the influence of a number of
prevailing assumptions of the Western world at the time:
a belief in the need to take firm action in defense of national interests; ...a mood of fatalism and determinism; the sociai-Darwinistic notions of struggle tor survival; the hyper-patriotic feelings of the military men and the "militarized" civilians; the cultural pessismism of elites alarmed at developing threats both within and without; the disregard tor the concepts of international law and morality. ...( lb)
Jonathan Steinberg, whose essay on German war plans is
included in the Kennedy volume, stresses that their plans
were "automatic"; they "had to untold without civilian
interference" , implying "a degree ot subordination of
civilian judgment to military 'necessity' which was not
characteristic of any ot the other Powers with the possible
exception ot Russia. "16
L.C.F. Turner agrees with this emphasis on the
Schlietten Flan, saying that historians have tailed to
stress how the Schlietten flan's application "...would lead
automatically to intense military activity. ..." and that
"the urgent need ot both France and Germany tor rapid
mobilization and early offensive action by their eastern
allies accelerated the whole tempo ot the crisis ot July
1914. "17 Turner also gives primacy to the position ot
Austria in 1914: "There was a teeling in Vienna that some drastic action was required it the Monarchy was not going to
iub collapse as a Great Power. "IB
Historian Paul Schroeder contends that "the search for
a fundamental cause o± World War 1 is futile. .. .LitJ was a
normal development in international relations; events had
been .building toward it tor a long time.... in this sense the
question Why not? answers the question Why?" Thus Schroeder
tries to determine what it was that ended "its long
postponement." 19 He focuses, like Turner, on the position
of Austria in the European balance of power system.
Schroeder states that all nineteenth century European wars were related to "a violent reaction from some declining or
threatened essential actor to a menace to its existence, essential interests, or prestige." This was true of Austria
in 1914. Rather than Germany, "which had allies, controlled neutrals. . .and was inherently strong, the Entente encircled 20 Austria-Hungary. Britain, tailing to see the danger in doing so, put first emphasis on an Anglo-French-Hussian alliance "in order to avoid disappointing the Russians," thereby arousing Austrian and German tears tor the security of its own alliance. 21 Germany could not lose her most reliable ally and thus had to go to war to protect her.
Schroeder 's thesis is not that the threat to Austria
Per se caused the war, though it was a catalyst which determined its timing, but that it was the balance of power system itself . He contends that the raison d'etre of British policy was the Triple Entente rather than improved relations
iub :
with Germany. "For the Entente powers and Italy, alliances were primarily associations tor profit." Germany, while world power was her goal, depended on her alliances for
security. 22 she therefore could not pursue Weltpolitik all out. Lack ot restraint, as the war later proved, "was bound to isolate her and destroy the system upon which she had to rely tor security as much as upon her army. "23 it was to the
Entente's advantage "not to overstrain the system holding
[.Germany! back" but Schroeder attributes this lack of insight to their own preoccupation with the advantages the system afforded them. 24
Schroeder borrows the analogy t irst used by Annales historian J.H. Hexter to explain the systemic dysfunction which caused World War 1:
"Galloping Gertie" was the popular name for the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington, which collapsed in 1940 when winds induced pressures on supporting members sufficient to cause the supports to generate destructive forces within the bridge. (25)
World War I, Shroeder believes, was another "Galloping Gertie"
...The very devices built into a system to keep it stable and operative under stress, subjected to intolerable pressures, generate forces of their own which cause the system to destroy itself ... .Witness how statesmen and military leaders everywhere in 1914, especially in the Central Powers, felt themselves to be in the grip ot uncontrollable forces. (2b)
Fritz Fischer devolves another perspective to the
10/ student of World Mar X. His book on German war aims, based
on archival material confiscated at the end of World War II,
contends that the Germans sought "to weld a continental
Mitteieuropa ' into a force that would place Germany on equal terms with the established and the potential world powers: the British Empire, Russia, and the United
States. "27 Concomitant with ambitions on the continent was the German leadership's desire to "revise the colonial status quo " and to construct a great naval fleet to carry it out. Sea power came to be identified with world power because of the imperial conquests of the late nineteenth century. 28 Germany's desire to annex territory on her eastern and western borders formed, according to Fischer, the most unyielding foundation of her war aims.
But the actions of the military and governmental elites had a social base in a particular ideological Weltanschauung held by many. Pre-war German university professors discussed the "fitting share of that world power which human nature and higher Providence assign to the civilised peoples. "29
They expressed concern for preservation of German culture.
After the war began, they attempted to infuse the war effort with emotional appeal, portraying it in terms of a Hegelian, historically determined moral struggle toward Germany's highest potential. 30
Economic interests, however, were of fundamental importance, as illustrated in the emergence of associations
108 of German industry, banking, shipping, and agriculture
formed to "concentrate" Central European markets. "Germany was developing more and more into a highly industrialized exporting country, and the problem of finding markets and raw materials to support her population was growing increasingly urgent. "-31 Underlying these economic concerns,
Fischer, in the tradition of Annales . identifies radical social, political, and economic structural changes which took place in the previous generation, industrial capitalism had brought widespread prosperity, and an expanding and disproportionately young population, concentrated in a few urban centers. Thus Germany's "consciousness of being a
'young' , growing and rising nation" led to "the demand for
Lebensraum . markets and industrial expansion. "32
Clearly Fischer does not neglect the political and diplomatic dimensions of war aims, in particular the German fear of encirclement, consciousness of strength, insistent urge for imperial expansion and need for security, but, like
Lenin and the Annales, he views them in the context of domestic reality and over a long term. The war is thus a paradigm of interactive forces: "ideological motives, religious or traditional, institutions and social
structures, old and new and (not least) material factors. "33
The personalities of those in power play a minor supporting
role in contrast.
Fischer cautions that his study of Germany must be
109 complemented with like studies of the other belligerent powers in order to understand their war aims, thus attempting to blunt the widespread criticism that he has placed too much emphasis on Germany's role in World War 1.
One ot the most vocal of these has been Gerhard Kitter, who looks at the war as a failure ot statecraft.
Whereas Fritz Fischer presents the history ot the war within the paradigm shared at least in part by Lenin and the
Annales , Kitter takes a historicist stance. For the most part his discussion rests on politics. His first volume of
The Sword and the Sceptor' on the war develops the theme of the "Prussian tradition that dominated the relation of state and army in Germany until the end of the era of Bismarck."-34
In Volume 11 he looks at effects of reversal of the "natural order" of military ("the sword") and civil ("the sceptor") control in the German government by 1914. The officer corps, the influence ot German military literature, the Schlieffen
Plan, and the activities ot the General Staff figure largely in his analysis. Volume ill focuses on very specifically on the War Chancellory of Bethmann-Hollweg. it is based on archival evidence, some ot the same used by Fritz Fischer, but Hitter's conceptualization ot his study, as well as his conclusions, are very different. Ritter calls for:
...insight into the countless individual interrelation-ships that must be known if one is to understand the course of political events and do justice to the acts of commission and ommission of
llu leading statesmen and soldiers, their successes as well as their lailures. (35)
He places strong emphasis on the inability at Bethmann-
Holweg, whom he sees as "an estimable statesman of character , "36 to rescue Germany from the throes of a hopeless war. The reason was not weakness of will, with which Bethmann-Holweg had been often charged, but a German militarism eni lamed with nationalist passion. "In wartime, politicians have always had a hard time gaining and maintaining authority against successful generals. "37
Closest in approach to Lenin in his view of the aims and causes of World War 1 is historian Arno Mayer. Like
Lenin, he writes that a discussion of World War 1 detached from the domestic situation, as diplomatic histories do, has
"grave limitations. "38 There is "inextricable interplay" between the dysfunctions of the international balance of power system and the domestic dysfunctions of the belligerents, 39 More simply, international and domestic tensions, arising from the inability of existing social structures to adjust peacefully to change, were tandem causal factors. Following the Russo-Japanese War, Mayer contends, "Europe's statesmen, politicians, diplomatists, and editorialists began to face up to LtheJ relationship between external and internal war," which they viewed in very different ways. Most conservatives "inclined to view war as an antidote to revolution." Those left of center,
ill among whom he includes Bethmann-Holweg, "tended to be afraid
of war as a precipitant of social revolution." Others,
including Wilson, Lloyd George, and Jaures "feared it as a breeding ground of reaction. "40
Mayer sees conditions creating potential civil war in
all the Great Powers in pre-war years. He suggests that many
of the most pro-war activists also "held reactionary,
ultraconservative, or prototascist views on domestic affairs, "41 and that their interest in the war was as a
counterrevolutionary deterrent to internal unrest. War
preparations would satisfy three functions in this respect:
1) To guard their political positions by diverting attention
to external issues; 2) To "reduce the politically unsettling
capitalist fluctuations of the capitalist economies by
raising armaments expenditures"; 3) To place defense of the status quo ahead of reform. 42
s Lenin ' View of the Future of War
With the exception of Arno Mayer and Fritz Fischer, all
of these contemporary historical discussions of the causes
of the Great War focus on diplomatic, military or political explanations of belligerent governments' actions and do not consider the changing social forces at work in each society. The underlying assumption for most was that the war was a period of hostilities confined to four years and primarily
to Europe. For Lenin, however, war was a social phenomenon,
112 )
a process of social transt ormation, a situation which did
not fundamentally change once hostilities were concluded,
and which did and would continue to have international repercussions. Mayer writes:
CWhileJ the Europe-oriented peace program of the Entente, L influenced by Wilson}, eventually brought the issues of arbitration, disarmament and world organization into a focal position, ... Lenin's Eurasian perspective led him to look at Europe not only in relation to the developing equalitarian revolution, but also in relation to the shifting picture ot world power and politics. Consequently, as agents and sponsors of these twin historical forces, the Bolsheviks never envisioned a diplomacy of peaceful change. (43)
The seeds of future wars lay already planted, scattered as
unevenly as the developing societies which would one day fight them.
- Historian Quincy Wright's A Study ot War suggests answers to the time-worn enigma ot why people resort to violence:
These two circumstances- that community formation tends to depend upon opinion and that the opinion which dominates at a historic moment may set the course of development for a long time — account for many wars, because war is the most effective instrument of rapid persuasion. (44)
Wright adds further that
most ot the great political blocs designated as sovereign states and most of the great changes in forms of organization have been effected through utilization of such rapid processes of persuasion as war or insurrection at the critical historical
moment . ( 45
In May 1917 Lenin wrote that many workers and peasants
113 say they're fighting tor freedom. "Where they go wrong... is
when they believe the war is being waged by them. "46 Lenin
knew that the task of his party was in great part to raise
class consciousness. Certainly symbols like the slogan
"Peace, Bread, and Land" played a role. But these were
symbols of a a different sort from the nationalist ideals
people were told they were fighting tor. These were basic
life issue symbols, tied to the struggle between the classes
and the traditional attitudes which would have to be changed
to assure a lasting new political order.
Quincy Wright was not optimistic about the end of war, though tor different reasons than Lenin:
While the political importance of war has varied under different conditions, it seems probable that war will continue to be of dominant political importance so long as the process of community formation and development remain a process of persuading people to accept symbols rather than a process of enlightening people on how unwanted conditions can be dealt with. (47)
But Lenin believed that war, especially it it was the total war which he equated with imperialism, by undermining old structures and functions and by arousing the understanding of the exploited masses, would, tar better than his party could do alone, radically alter the opinion of misinformed and misled workers still not conscious ot the class nature ot war. The tremendous famine, exhaustion, hardship and horror brought on by a war of the magnitude ot
World War 1 would facilitate the acceptance of a new set of
114 symbols, as long as those symbols did, indeed, show how
"unwanted conditions could be dealt with." Lenin and his
party sought to provide those symbols in Russia. Hut as he
looked at the world and not just at Europe, Lenin saw what
the founders of the League of Nations failed to see and
which historians of the war have not adequately emphasized.
Even if imperialist war leads to successful social
revolution in one country or one region, wars will be
inevitable for a long time to come because of the uneven
progression of countries in the rest of the world through
their own stages of economic development. As long as these
wars are fought primarily to further the goal of freedom for
the masses of the people and not in the interest of private
property or nationalist expansionism, they will be, in
Lenin's eyes, just wars. Lenin wrote in 1916 that
"disarmament is the ideal of socialism; there will be no wars in socialist society. " But until there is a socialist world and because the bourgeoisie is armed " against the proletariat" LLenin's emphasis}, "disarmament is not Marxist. "48
Women and teenage children fought in the Paris Commune side by side with the men. It will be no different in the coming battles for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Proletarian women will not look on passively as poorly armed or unarmed workers are shot down by the well-armed forces of the bourgeoisie. They will take to arms, as they did in 1871, and from the cowed nations of today -- or more correctly, from the present-day labor movement, disorganized more by the opportunists than by the governments — there will undoubtedly
115 arise, sooner or later, but with absolute certainty, an international league of the "terrible nations" of the revolutionary proletariat. (49)
In 1918, when it was becoming clear that a socialist
Europe was not imminent, Lenin wrote; "Violence must
inevitably accompany the collapse of capitalism in its entirety and the birth of socialist society. That violence
will constitute a period of world history, a whole era of
various kinds of wars " The new epoch was, Lenin said,
only beginning; there are many possible stages of transition to socialism. 50
The implications of Lenin's vision of the end of war in
a socialist world will likely never be tested. As this ideal was in the distant future, Lenin gave it little thought other than to assume that if the oppressed classes held the
reins of power, class antagonisms would fade. Clearly, for the immediate future, wars would be an integral part of the international scene. In Russia, his concept of "dictatorship of the proletariat" led to totalitarianism, which Lenin viewed as necessary to eliminate the vestiges of bourgeois rule and to further instill proletarian class consiousness.
His ultimate goal, the warless socialist world, seems as ideal and unreal as the vision of Wilson and others that deraocratic-captialist means, i.e. such reforms as arbitration and disarmament, would eliminate wars. But this valid critique cannot call into question the significance of
lib Lenin's vision ot a world in transition. The power of
Lenin's belief in the correctness ot his theory translated,
into an intransigence which sahotaged any more than
temporary accommodations with capitalist society.
in an article written hy a Soviet historian in the 1984
issue of the Soviet periodical Kommunist are many of the
same points ot interpretation of the meaning ot the First World War as Lenin understood it which have heen discussed
in this paper. But when the Soviets use this historical
material to explain imperialist aggression, the need to
strengthen world socialism, and the need to prevent the
nuclear war, they are coming from a different set of
"objective circumstances" than those of 1917. The question
of who is doing what to whom, for example, in Afghanistan,
is one which the Soviets often fail to acknowledge or
answer. 51 Nevertheless, the point here is to seek
understanding of the present Soviet Weltanschauung about
war. Today Soviet socialist society fears imperialist war
and prepares to prevent it, while, viewing war as a process
of intensifying social change, at the same time sees wars
of national liberation as tools for its own politics. The
study ot Lenin's theory ot war provides a lens through which
the Soviet perspective on war half a century later can be more clearly focused.
117 ,.
Notes to Chapter b
lArno J. Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin: Political Origins nf the Mew Diplomacy, 1917-1918 (Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Co., 1959), p. 87.
2 Ibid . . p. 249.
^Lenin, "Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?" XXVI Collected Works . (October 1, 1917), p. 120.
4Lenin, "Letter to the Central Committee, The Moscow and Petrograd Committees and the Bolshevik Members of the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets," XXVI, Collected Works (October 1, 1917), p. 141. '
5Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin , p. 248.
^Sidney Bradshaw fay. The Origins of the World War (2nd ed., revised; 2 vols, in one: New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), p. 4b.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid. , p. 558.
9 Pierre Renouvin, The Immediate Origins of the War trans. by Theodore Carswell Hume with a preface Charles Seymour bv (New York: Howard Per tig, 19b9), p. 11. Renouvin wrote a second book on World War I in 1957 called War and Aftermath: 1914-1929. trans, by Remy Ingles Hall (New York- Harper and Row, 1968), in which he widened his focus beyond Europe to much of the rest of the world and discussed the need to examine war aims , public mood and domestic economic interests. See pp. 3-5.
A^Ibid. , pp. 353-354.
lllbid. , p. 11.
12Kennedy, ed. The War Plans of the Great Pnwprc. p. 12. '
13 lbid . p. 19.
L4lbid. , pp. 15-16.
J-5 lbid . . p. 18.
16lbid. p. 162.
118 ,,
17 Ibid . , pp. 257, 217.
IB lbid . . p. 253.
19Paul Schroeder, "World War I as Galloping Gertie: A Reply to Joachim Remak, Journal of Modern History . Vol. 44 No. 3, (Sept. 1972), p. 332.
20lbid. , p. 335.
21Ibid. , pp. 331-332.
22lbid, p. 334.
23 lt>id . , p. 333.
24lbid.
25lbid. , p. 321. See J.H. Hexter, The History Primer (New York, 1970).
26lbid.
27Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961) p.xxii.
2B ibid . p. 8.
29lbid., p. 9.
30lbid. , p. 156.
31lbid. p. 11.
32lbid.
33 lbid . p. xxi.
34Gerhard Hitter, The Sword and the Sceptor: The Problem of Mili tarism in Germany . Vol. II, trans, by Heinz Norden (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press 1970, p 7.
3 5 Ibid. , preface to Vol. Ill, p.l.
3 6 Ibid. , p. 485.
37lbid. , p. 486.
119 •38Arno J. Mayer, "Domestic Causes of the First World War," in Leonard Krieger and Fritz Stern, eds. , The Responsibility of Power: Historical Essays in Honor of Halo Holborn (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1967), p. 287. JS lbid . , p. 288.
tO lbid . , p. 293.
41lbid. , pp. 291-292.
4 2 Ibid. , p. 288.
43Mayer, Wilson vs. Lenin , p. 303.
44wright, A Study of War , p. 1040.
4 5 Ibid. , p. 1041.
4&Lenin, "War and Revolution," XXIV, Collected Works
(May 1917) , p. 407.
47 Wright, p. 1039. AQ '"Lenin, "The Disarmament Slogan," XXI11 Collected Works (October 1916), pp. 94-104. 49 Ibid. , p 98.
BQLenin, "Report on the Review of the Programme and on Changing the Name of the Party: March 8," XXVII, Collected Works . (March 8, 1918), pp. 130-131.
SlKrivoguz, Prof. I., "World War Is Lessons in History," Kommunist . No. 11 (July 1984), p. 127.
Chapter 7 —
Comparison and Critique: Marx, Lenin. & Annales: Conclusions
Conflicting interpretations of both Marx's and Lenin's theories are ubiquitous in scholarly works. There is,
120 however, one approach which makes the puzzle seem to fit:
that of an organic model of society. An interpretation of
Marx developed by Professor Melvin Rader, University of Washington, forms an insightful basis for comparison with the Annales and for analyzing those of Lenin's perceptions founded in his "intellectual father".
Karl Marx's most complete work on pre-capitalist socioeconomies, his Formen die der Kapitalistischen Voherqehen ( Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations ). a part of
the Grundrisse largely unknown until the twentieth century,
is central to the Annales comparision. In its preface he
wrote that "the economic structure of society is formed by
the totality Cmy emphasis] of Cthe social] relations of
production Cand the material forces of production]. "1 One
can posit, from observing its context in his works, that
Marx used the term "economic" in a broader sense than the
narrowly defined discipline of economics. The Greek roots
oikos (house) and nomos (managing) imply a concept closer to
the Annales portrayal of material lite.
The two most important models of Marx's view of history which Rader describes are base-super structure and organic .
There are two versions of base-superstructure, keeping
in mind that base equals mode of production and the superstructure equals the political-legal statP . pi us science, philosophy, art, religion, morality and custom subsumed under culture.
121 The first version, fundamentalist , lies closest to one-
way narrowly economic determinism. The second version
dialectical. implies an interaction .between the two strata
with the base prevailing. 2
But it is the organic model which Rader believes was
Marx's "mature insight. "3
In his more organic formulations, there is no sharp dualism or clearcut distinction between the productive forces and productive relations, the polity and the economy, theory and practice, science and industry, culture and base. All of them not only interdepend but interpenetrate. ( 4)
A mechanical analogy of base with superstructure is inconsistent with Marx's holistic point of view. But without
diverting from his organic analogy, Marx could point out an organism's hierarchical structure to explain the preeminence
of mode of production. Thus the central idea of the first
model — the dominant causal role in history of mode of
production — can be incorporated into the second. 5 As Rader notes, " — Interpreted as rival descriptions they are
irreconcilable, but interpreted as heuristic tools they can be harmonized." 6
In sum, Marx's organic model was a differentiated and dynamic construct which took account of the historical complexity of a society nearly as completely as the Annales' unifying histories. "How absurd," wrote Marx, "is the conception of history held hitherto which neglects the real relationships and confines itself to the high-sounding
122 9
dramas ot princes and states. "7 He truly led the way to Annales in this respect.
Marx was not unaware that historical development was
multilinear and uneven. S "He recognxzed the importance of
organic context in producing a unique configuration of
historical events," an idea intrinsic to the "very concept
of a complex organic whole." When Russian ethnologist N.K.
Mikhailovsky stated that Russia, too, must pass through a
capitalist phase, Marx replied "that events of a striking
similarity, hut occurring in different contexts Cmy
emphasis J produced quite different results.
Nevertheless, Marx and Engels, unlike Lenin and the
Annales, tried to apply primarily European medieval
material to a skimpy understanding of primitive pre-
capitalist societies. In the 1850s, modern anthropology was
"in its infancy." Marx and Engels' state of knowledge in that period was limited to "oriental" (India), Greco-Roman,
"Germanic", and "Slavonic" history. 10 The Annales school has a wider data hase and a less rigidly structured, more complex schema ot world economies.
In his Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations . Marx wrote:
"Man is only individualized through the process ot history. He appears originally as a generic heing, a tribal being, a herd "11 animal The country, not the city, was the origin of social organization. 12 The rural structures of
Marx's "Asiatic" or "oriental" society were, for example,
12 i long "untouched by the storm clouds of the political sky"
because dynastic upheavals did not affect the simple
organization of production, the key to these societies'
unchangeableness.13 Man must have a sense ot exploitation,
become alienated, before social revolution becomes a
possibility. Both consciousness of new ideas or old
illusions and with that, material life, must first be altered.
Marx's organic model has synchronic and diachronic
aspects. The synchronic or structural is "the whole looked
at in cross-section." And the diachronic perspective of the model is process , an inner and outer dialectic as the
structure develops and changes. 14 Certainly this model has
its counterpart in the Hestian/Hermaean elements of the Annales.
Engels' Conditions of the Working Class in England , written in 184b, supports the organic model conceptualiza-
tion. The motif was rural subsistence, organized around home and family. Before the expansion of trade, industry and machines, the local market was the sole outlet for woven products made by wives and daughters. As these home markets expanded along with the population, there was full employment. Engels wrote that the weavers and other workers of pre-industrial England could arrange their own working hours, enjoying plenty of leisure time. Life was comfortable, peaceful, with opportunities for recreation.
124 t
"Children grew up in the open axr of the countryside." Child
labor, so appalling in the industrial era, was unknown. The people in each locality:
regarded the squire... as their natural superior. . .Land 1 showed him... the deference which naturally arose out of CthisJ patriarchal relationship. . . . They were not much troubled with intellectual, [political J, and spiritual problems, and the even tenor of their lives was seldom disturbed. (15)
it is an idyllic scene, a "mythology" 16. Engels' view
of rural pre-industrial England is too simplistic. But when
Engels discussed the transformation of this pre- industrial
society, his analysis, though still idealistic and
Eurocentric, was more prescient. He suggested that when the
industrial Revolution made over these men into machines, it
also awakened them "from their quiet, plant-like existence"
to a new consciousness of what it means to be human.
Although their lives were happy, they had been "spiritually
dead; they lived only for their petty private
interests. . .and knew nothing of the mighty events that moved
mankind in the world outside. "17 Marx and Engels would hark back to that non-worldly rural scene, attempting to
transpose its best elements -- essentally those of
Gemeinschaf — onto a modern, industrialized world in which
those whom they assumed to be now conscious, unalienated men could practice a full and tree communal way of life.
But the dialectic in Engels' description of English society as it changed from rural to urban was not
125 everywhere and always so powertul, so all -encompassing.
Though, as noted, Marx was aware of the possibility of
different paths to capitalism, e.g. in Russia, it was Lenin
who realized that pre-industrial, traditional societies,
reacting not to endogenous capitalism hut to exogenous
imperialism, could be very slow in accepting the
perceptions, norms and methods of the modern world. He believed that although uneven, acceptance and progressive
change would come, and — the central thesis of this paper
— that in times and under the "objective conditions" of
social crisis generated by war, change would be more rapid
and more radical because the horrors of the war accelerate
consiousness of what the war is really about: class
struggle. Hegel had helped him to see this; through Hegel
he realized that historical progress must take place in the
mind as well as in the world. Lenin, too, could not avoid
the nineteenth century romantic faith in progress brought by
revolution. But it is significant that he placed war at the
center of his model of social trans* ormation — as not a
series of violent events which began with battles and ended with a treaty — but as a process of radical change permeating down to the lowest levels of society.
The historians of the Annales put more emphasis on the reassertion of traditional patterns in times of crisis. The people of a traditional society have a world view which locks out change; they do not accommodate themselves to
i2b modern ideas and methods. There is no dialectic, no cultural
interaction or understanding. There can only be conflict,
deep-seated and seemingly irreconcilable. in such a
situation, if modernization is to take place and if it
cannot evolve organically, then, to continue the organic
metaphor, it must be transplanted. As Stoianovich points
out, it required Communist state-imposed industrialization
in the BalJcans, "often waged and won with an obdurate nonchalance to human suffering", to bring successful "takeoff ".IB
Marxists have argued that firaudel ' s conception of structure and time is "insufficiently dialectical. "19 Though
Braudel is not as confident of revolutionary solutions, certainly, in his discussion of capitalist transformation, he showed that, in the advanced societies of modern era, continuous change has replaced the static societies of the past. The Annales of today has the advantage of a longer perspective on the "industrial Revolution." Change in the consciousness of "alienated man" has been and continues to be gradual, uneven, uncertain, in the Balkans, as elsewhere in the lesser developed world, the "residual presence of the old material past [.continues! to make itself felt. "20
Whether capitalist of socialist, the new culture of the Balkans has not totally destroyed the old, and in many respects the old LneolithicJ ways are more significant because they lie deep and rise to the surface in times of crisis. But the new ways are also a factor and one day the new ways will become the old and familiar .( 21)
127 Marx, Lenin, and the historians ot the Annales speak a
language common in many important respects. in comparing
their understanding ot history, several points are dominant.
1) All share a paradigm ot war as a process ot social
transformation. I) They distrust the conventional tocus on
the actions ot political and economic elites tor historical
explanations; I) They have similar interpretations of social change as ret lections ot a society's mental ite . which they
see in a pattern ot interpenetrating, dialectical levels; S)
They correspond in the notion that social structural change
was radically accelerated by capitalism, hut, as Lenin and
the Annales perceived, acceptance and restructuring would be
more erratic and disruptive in areas where it was an
exogenous influence; 4) They share an observation that war,
whether as an extension ot capitaiist-turned-imperiaiist
policy, or in a different epoch or less developed country where it was an extension ot feudal policy, intensified that
process ot change. War and preparations for war are not an aberration in otherwise peaceful social relations but rather a violent form of previous government policies and concomitant developing social crises.
Lenin was not a scholar of civilizations nor was his analysis as interdisciplinary as those ot the Annales historians, but in realizing that each country and its wars must be studied within its own concrete setting, he was like
12S the AnnaJ.es historians in recognizing historical complexity.
His analysis was o± global dimensions and in that sense akin
" to the Annales ' histoire globale. "22 His method, which Marx
also shared, of observing hidden meaning and its class
significance in the written word, especially notable in the
crisis over war aims, follows the same model as Annales ' communications analysis.
As witnesses to World War 1, Lenin and the founders of
Annales shared a recognition that this war, (or in Marx and
Engels' view, the coming total war they foresaw), generated
a social crisis. But where they differ is in their
prospective tor the future. The historians of the Annales
see that traditional ways persist despite even so
significant a social crisis as world war. One need only
witness the postwar growth of fascism to see how old values
distort or impede change. They perpetuate or foster
attitudes grounded in the past, for example, acceptance of authoritarianism.
But, as noted, Lenin, like Marx, retained the
nineteenth century belief in progress. He thought the
imperialist war had the profound capacity to upset a mentalite which had remained resistant to social change.
By raising their consciousness of the war's class nature,
the true meaning of their sacrifices, and the effects of its unprecedented scope and horror on the fabric of their lives, such a war would alienate the working classes, and by
129 t
driving them to take action, create the conditions for what
Lenin as well as Marx expected would be a civil war across
all of war-ravaged Europe. Lenin viewed war as a powerful
vehicle capable of transforming man's environment and his
view of society, creating the new social order Marx had
envisioned, but at different times and a different pace
throughout the world. Thus, unlike Marx, Lenin did not
foresee an end to war except in the distant future of a
wholly socialist world.
Notes to Chapter Seven
•'•E.J. Hobsbawm, intro. in Karl Marx, Pre-Capi talis
Economic Formations , ed. and with intro. by E.J. Hobsbawm, trans, by Jack Cohen (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 17.
2Melvin Rader, Marx's Interpretation of History (New ifork: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. xix-xx.
J Ibid. , p. 5b.
4 Ibid. , p. 10.
^Ibid. , pp. xxi, 145. 6 Ibid. , p. 232.
7 Karl Marx, "The German Ideology: Part I," in Robert C. Tucker, ed. , The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed. , New York: H.W. Norton, 1978), p. 163.
8Rader, p. 131.
3 Ibid . , pp. 131-132.
lOMarx, Pre-Capitalist . . . pp. 25-26.
lllbid. , p. 96.
130 lZ lbid . , p. 28.
13Rader, p. 123.
14lbid. , pp. 135-13b.
l5Fredench Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England . trans, and ed. hy W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chaloner (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1958), pp. 10-11.
lfcSteven Marcus, Engels. Manchester and the Working Class (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 136.
17lbid.
•LS Stoianovich, Balkan Civilization , p. 105.
19Gregor McLennan, Marxism and the Methodologies of History (London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1981), p. 138.
20Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life , p. 442.
ilStoianovich, Balkan Civilization , p. 190.
22stoianovich, French Historical Method. . . pp. 102- 104.
L31 ,
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143 LENIN AND HAK : AN HIST0RI0GRAPH1CAL ANALYSIS OF HIS EVOLVING PERCEPTION
by
Janice W. Simone
B.A. Hartwick , College, Oneonta, N,Y. , 1974
AN ABSTRACT OF A MASTER'S THESIS
submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of History
KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY Manhattan, Kansas
1986 ABSTRACT
Central to an understanding of V.I. Lenin's theory of war is his personal observation and experience of World War I. Disappointed in the mass defection from international socialism to "defense of the fatherland", Lenin renewed his belief in the possibility of a proletarian revolution created by the unprecedented conditions of total war. World War 1, a protracted struggle which affected all of society, was the catalyst for revolution or serious political crises throughout Europe. Its largely unexpected horrors marked a permanent transformation in its participants' historical understanding of themselves and the meaning of war. In its wake came a new world- as opposed to
Europe-oriented perspective in international relations. This study is an historiographical analysis of Lenin's views of war as they evolved from the early twentieth century to 1917. Central to Lenin's thinking was the concept of uneven political and economic development of societies throughout the world. The essence of its meaning to Lenin was that war, rather than being a phenomenon soon to be obsolete, would continue indefinitely. He instructed fellow socialists that as class struggle is therefore not at the same stage or pace everywhere in the world, so also must the justness of each war be determined in relative terms. For historiographical comparison, this study draws from
Marx and Engels, Lenin's intellectual fathers; the French historical Annales school, seen by some as a new historical paradigm which emerged following the Great War; and the histories of the war written in the inter-war and contemporary periods.